A Girl Named Disaster recounts an eventful year in the life of an African girl named Nhamo, the Shona word for "disaster."
Nhamo has spent the first eleven years of her life in a traditional Shona village in Mozambique, where her unloving maternal relatives treat her as a drudge. Her father shamefully ran away after killing another man, and her mother was killed by a leopard when Nhamo was a toddler. Only her grandmother and one female cousin show Nhamo any affection. When cholera strikes, the villagers consult an important traditional healer, who makes Nhamo the scapegoat for all the troubles plaguing the village. To placate the angry spirit of her father's murder victim, the healer decrees, Nhamo must become the junior wife of the victim's brutal brother.
At her grandmother's insistence, Nhamo escapes.....
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