Bananas in the Rafters, sweeps the ardent young reader into a youthful adventure filled with great ethnic and cultural awakening, set within a world that has been misrepresented for centuries to many a non-African born child. Focusing on a small town located in a fictional West African nation, the children of Saint Paul?s Parish come alive once more after their celebration in The Christmas Hut, (also by the author) to share an important period in their lives while growing up in a part of the world within a continent, that is often tainted with massive socioeconomic setbacks and underdevelopment. Bananas in the rafters, focuses on families, leaders, children and average citizens, living within a community that operates within a grander culture of tribes, separated traditionally by religion, and culturally by dialects yet strongly united by nationality as one people. Its captivating text educates the young reader about a world out there, where the author once thrived as a child, as it uniquely weaves an enlightening variety of subject matters, from the yarns of family values, education and individual life experiences while sparingly dipping them into rigid realistic dyes of colonization, independence, revolutions, and an aspiring fight for national stability, before spinning them on looms that strengthen the stitching of history, education, and development together, in order to produce the best sociocultural fabric fit for the prospective wholesome blooming of the growing child. It is, indeed, the ultimate book tailored for this progressive era of cultural awareness and ethnic embrace. For within its pages, the reader?s imagination, as well as eyes, are open into the original workings of the African culture, in a far more practical way, than has ever been made literarily tasteful and readily accessible, to any African-authored young adult reader.
