Departures

This colorful and turbulent coming-of-age novel takes place in a dystopic African-American community located in Philadelphia just before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The story is told solely through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl. Sisi Aisha Johnson does a marvelous job with narration, but the child's voice quickly becomes grating and tedious. Johnson's repertoire of characters is an imaginatively complex interpretation of the child's mimicry of the people around her. Perhaps the way to appreciate this audiobook is to listen to it in small segments, or to simply accept the child's cloying whine as an authentic portrayal. P.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine