Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	A Girl Named Disaster
	Author:	Farmer, Nancy
	Date Published:	1996
	Genre:	Adventure
	Grade Level:	7 - 8
	Booktalker:	Kathy Preller
	Awards:	Newbery Honor Book

Booktalk:
Naturally, when we booktalk, you expect us to talk about books. That's logical. But I want to tell you about A Girl Named Disaster. It is a book, about an 11-yr old girl, living in Mozambique in 1981. Her small village is hit with a Cholera epidemic, and the villagers decide it is Nhamo's fault. To appease the angry spirits, they decide Nhamo must marry horrible, mean old man, who already has several wives. If the mean man doesn't kill her, the wives will make her life an endless torture. Nhamo's grandmother makes her run away. She takes a boat, and is told to head toward Zimbabwe, to find her father. Grandmother says it's about two days, upstream. But Nhamo makes mistakes. She's never handles a boat before. When she was close enough to see the lights of Zimbabwe in the distance, she tied her boat to some weeds while she slept. When she woke up, she had drifted far downstream. It takes her a year to get to Zimbabwe. She loses heart living alone so long, and almost dies of starvation. It's a great story, so why am I going to tell you not to read it? Because I want you to listen to it on tape. There are many Shona words in the story, and if you are like me, you won't have a clue how to pronounce them. Ambuya, Nganga, Sadza, Ngozi… But the words are beautiful - what a pleasant sound to the language. So that's why I specifically recommend the book on tape version of A Girl Named Disaster, by Nancy Farmer.