STILL WATERS IN NIGER

A woman restores her frayed relationship with an adult daughter, in a story that’s more a meditation on motherhood and place (in this case Africa) than a narrative-centered tale. The nameless narrator, a middle-aged Irish-American woman, returns to Niger, where her eldest daughter Zara is working at a medical center in the provincial town of Matamaye. It lies near Zinder, the village the narrator lived in 17 years before with her three children and husband, who was then working on his Ph.D. dissertation. Both towns are on the edge of the desert; sandstorms are common, water scarce, and crops scanty. In addition, malnutrition is endemic, beggars with horrible deformities are numerous, and many of the children Zara cares for are dying of hunger. As the narrator accompanies Zara on her rounds, meeting her daughter’s women friends, she is preoccupied with her failure to have done more to help when she lived in Zinder, where something happened that marred her relationship with her daughter. And in luminous if sometimes overwrought prose she recalls her own often difficult relationship with her mother and her confused emotions upon learning that she was pregnant with Zara. But as she meets African women and their daughters, she realizes that they are bound by ties that both strain and strengthen their relationships. In an anticlimactic, even trite revelation, the narrator learns why Zara felt that her mother failed her on her sixth birthday in Zinder. Rifts healed, insights gained, and a symbolic gift made, she is then ready to leave both Zara and Zinder. First-novelist Hill, who once lived in Africa herself, offers some beautiful evocations of place and people but not enough, sadly, to give this thin tale life.