The heartbreaking story of five generations of young people from a
single African-and-American family pursuing an elusive dream of
freedom.
Gut wrenching and incredible."-- Sabaa Tahir #1 New York Times
bestselling author of An Ember in the Ashes
This novel is a remarkable achievement.--Kelly Barnhill, New York
Times bestselling author and Newbery medalist
Beautifully epic.--Ibi Zoboi, author American Street and National Book
Award finalist
Dream Country begins in suburban Minneapolis at the moment when
seventeen-year-old Kollie Flomo begins to crack under the strain of his
life as a Liberian refugee. He's exhausted by being at once too black
and not black enough for his African American peers and worn down by the
expectations of his own Liberian family and community. When his
frustration finally spills into violence and his parents send him back
to Monrovia to reform school, the story shifts. Like Kollie, readers
travel back to Liberia, but also back in time, to the early twentieth
century and the point of view of Togar Somah, an eighteen-year-old
indigenous Liberian on the run from government militias that would force
him to work the plantations of the Congo people, descendants of the
African American slaves who colonized Liberia almost a century earlier.
When Togar's section draws to a shocking close, the novel jumps again,
back to America in 1827, to the children of Yasmine Wright, who leave a
Virginia plantation with their mother for Liberia, where they're
promised freedom and a chance at self-determination by the American
Colonization Society. The Wrights begin their section by fleeing the
whip and by its close, they are then the ones who wield it. With each
new section, the novel uncovers fresh hope and resonating heartbreak,
all based on historical fact.
In Dream Country, Shannon Gibney spins a riveting tale of the
nightmarish spiral of death and exile connecting America and Africa, and
of how one determined young dreamer tries to break free and gain control
of her destiny.
