A Girl Named Disaster | Suggested Reading

A Girl Named Disaster Related Titles

Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994) is also set in Zimbabwe and discusses Shona customs, but it is a science fiction tale that projects those customs into the twenty-first century. When General Matsika's three children are kidnapped, the general and his wife hire three mutant detectives—the Ear, the Eye, and the Arm—to find and rescue the children. But the detectives are always one step behind the resourceful children, who escape from one tricky situation to another. One of the places the children find refuge is a traditional Shona village very much like Nhamo's. The Shona spirit world is as much a reality in The Ear, the Eye and the Arm as it is in A Girl Named Disaster.

Survival stories with male protagonists are much more common than stories about female survivors, but there are several wellknown stories with female protagonists, including Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) and Jean Craighead George's Julie of the Wolves (1972) and its recent sequel, Julie's Wolf Pack (1997). Island of the Blue Dolphins tells the story of an Indian girl who survives alone for eighteen years on an island off the coast of California. In Julie of the Wolves, a thirteen-year-old Eskimo girl runs away from an unwanted marriage and is befriended by a wolf pack. The parallel to Nhamo's story is obvious. Both of these earlier novels won the Newbery Award, an achievement A Girl Named Disaster almost equaled.