The Means That Make Us Strangers by Christine Kindberg

I stayed standing, turning my hands over and over in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. The others scrambled to get the figs that had landed in the grass. A fig hit the white hands and fell to the ground, and it was with shock that I felt the pain in my hands. I remember thinking how different those arms looked, while waiting for fruit to drop as Maicaah shook the branch. Among the thicket of deep-black arms stretching toward the fruit, two arms stood out, pale as a full moon.

The result is a gorgeous meditation on growing up, experiencing love, and finding home.' - Pinckney Benedict, three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, author of Dogs of God and Miracle Boy and Other Stories From CHAPTER 1: A tangle of arms reaching toward the fig tree. Christine Kindberg treats all of these characters graciously and with deep generosity. Adelaide must finally choose where she belongs: the Ethiopian village where she grew up, to which she promised to return? Or this place where she's become part of something bigger than herself? ' The Means That Make Us Strangers is a beautifully written coming-of-age story that will satisfy experienced readers as well as younger ones. Life in Greenville becomes interesting, and home becomes a much more complex equation. Even as she navigates her family's expectations and her mother's depression, Adelaide starts to enjoy her new friendships, the chance to learn new things, and the time she spends with a blond football player. Then Adelaide becomes friends with the five African-American students who sued for admission into the white high school. But until she turns eighteen, Adelaide must adjust to this strange, white place that everyone tells her is home. Adelaide vows to find her way back to Ethiopia, marry Maicaah, and become part of the village for real. Then her family moves to South Carolina, in 1964. But who are your people? Adelaide has lived her whole life in rural Ethiopia as the white American daughter of an anthropologist. Her bracing prose draws you into the lives of characters who live and breathe upon the page.' - Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize) Home is where your people are. 'Christine Kindberg's fiction explores the complexity of identity, love, and faith with extraordinary intimacy and skill.

The Means That Make Us Strangers by Christine Kindberg