Yoruba Girl Dancing — Simi Bedford

“Yoruba Girl Dancing is at once acerbic and moving and painfully honest about the cost of emigration and adjustment.” -- The Washington Post

Born into a privileged Nigerian family, Remi Foster has a life in Africa that is a celebration of love and family, eccentricity and ritual. But at the age of six she is uprooted when her father sends her to a posh all-girls boarding school in England. There, the only black in a school of perfect English girls, she navigates the labyrinth of race, caste, and culture, enduring taunting classmates and foreign holidays celebrated with strangers. Finally, caught between two cultures, Remi must discover who she truly is -- a Yoruba girl dancing.

“Effortless, elegant, charming . . . Bedford has created a gutsy girl . . . of naturally hot temper, undercut by a canny survival instinct, a cool number, yet all too capable of bewilderment and hurt.” -- Chicago Tribune