Review: Dream Country

Dream Country by Shannon Gibney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kollie is having trouble adjusting in America as a Liberian refugee. He doesn’t fit in with the African American’s in his school and doesn’t understand the expectations of his Liberian family. They have threatened to send him back to Monrovia, but Kollie doesn’t believe them. The story then changes to the previous century when Togar is in Liberia and on the run from the militia. They want him to work on the plantations started by the African American slaves that colonized Liberia in the nineteenth century. As Togar’s story comes to an end, the story takes another leap backward to Yasmine who wants to leave America and start a new life in a promising colony called Liberia. They have been told that they can make a new life for themselves on their original continent; they just need to be willing to work hard.

Dream Country is a stand-alone historical fiction story told in reverse order. Although the overall story was informative and entertaining, I was given the audiobook version to review and without the pages clearly telling the story was changing, it was confusing. The first story from Kollie’s point of view was also full of foul language that was distracting and unwanted. If I had checked this book out from my library, I would not have finished it because of the language in these first few chapters. I will say that after Kollie’s story was over, the language issue was also finished. The description mentions five generations of young people from the same family, but the connections between them is not very clear in the audiobook. I would have preferred the story to be told in chronological order (instead of reverse order). This is one time that a literary device was detrimental to the enjoyment of the story.


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