medievaljuliana 's review for:

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

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This is not a school story of girls coming together to beat the odds stacked against them. If anything, what you get is a tale of how young women very easily become part of a machine that can't wait to oppress others. It's a story of privilege in the making and social awakening, where you will likely be holding your breath if you know in what direction Rwandan history was marching towards in the early 1990s.

The first few chapters of the novel are quite fragmentary and episodic and it takes a bit for it to coalesce into a straightforward narrative, but this works very effectively to introduce and depict the different factions and interests at play in the school and among the students. Just the same, while most characters come across as rather one-dimensional, this contributes to the claustrophobic crescendo of tensions inside the school and beyond.

If you're not familiar with the history of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, I would suggest at least skimming the wikipeda page about it, for some context (the book is self-contained but it is heavily reliant on the context about which it talks very little).

TW: sexual violence, murder, genocide