A National Book Award nominee, MANY STONES is Carolyn Coman's latest foray into family dynamics and dysfunction. Sixteen-year-old Berry Morgan is engulfed in a morass of grief and anger, sliding ever further into the darkness therein. Enter her father, the loathsome lobbyist, from whom Berry has been estranged since he abandoned his family for a younger woman. Concerned by her lack of interest in anything, Berry's father invites her along on a trip to South Africa. The purpose of the trip is actually twofold. Her father has business to attend to (of course), but they have also been invited to a memorial service in honor of Berry's older sister, Laura, who was murdered there several years prior. Against a timely post-apartheid backdrop teeming with loss and reconciliation, a father and daughter come to grips with their own loss and engender their own reconciliation.

Like the hero who falls into darkness and is brought back by spiritual guidance, Berry is brought back by the forgiving and optimistic spirit of the Black South Africans, who, after having suffered unthinkably at the hands of their oppressors, carry no bitterness in their hearts. As she encounters more and more instances of degradation, namely depravation, imprisonment, torture, and death, her own problems begin to seem almost trivial by comparison. Slowly, her anger at her father and her grief over her sister begin to dissipate, only to be replaced by the love her sister once embodied.

Although the ending is a bit neat, Coman should be commended for her authentic sketches of South African life, which recall Alan Paton's CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY, and for rendering the complexities of grief and anger so believably.

  --- Reviewed by Tammy L. Currier

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