The House at Sugar Beach

Cooper's memoir includes elements of Liberian culture and history as well as details on generations past of her "Congo" family, descended from two Liberian dynasties. Her fourteenth birthday begins with the thrill of getting a diamond for a present and ends with watching her uncle being executed during a coup. The sweetness of her early years at Sugar Beach ends as the family flees to the U.S. In her new country Cooper's experiences a difficult adjustment due to cultural ignorance of her native land and her longing for the foster sister she had to leave behind. Cooper's reading is less agile than her writing--her narration is flat. However, to her dialogue she provides accents and intonations that add verve to the production. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

March 10, 2008
Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. On Cooper’s 14th birthday, her mother gives her a diamond pendant and sends her to school. Cooper is “convinced that somehow our world would right itself.” That afternoon her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, is executed. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. There’s the halcyon early childhood in Africa, a history of the early settlement of Liberia, an account of the violent, troubled years as several regimes are overthrown, and the story of the family’s exile to America. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating, but a flatness prevails—perhaps one that mirror’s the author’s experience. After her uncle’s televised execution, Cooper does “the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happens: I focus on something else. I concentrate on minutiae. It’s the only way to keep going when the world has ended.”