Annaka

When 16-year-old Annaka Brooks returns at last to her childhood home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, she must confront changes as well as old memories. Her beloved grandfather has died, her grandmother is in a fog of dementia, and her old school friends have grown up in the 10 years she has been away.

But her imaginary childhood friend, Clay, is still here, and he is real. With the power to transport Annaka into events from the pages of the journal she shared with Grampy, Clay might be able to help her Nan’s Alzheimer’s, find out who her father is, and discover the identity of the other “Annaka” in her Grampy’s part of the journal. Immersed in the past, Annaka, who now goes by “Anna”, risks her happiness and her safety to find answers that give her a new perspective on the present.

In Annaka, author Andre Fenton examines the struggle of a young African-Nova Scotian girl to find a balance between who she was and who she has become. The novel uses fantasy elements to advance the story, but Anna’s search for identity is rooted in adolescent reality. Anna yearns for the security of her childhood, but she also wants the truth about the present. She works hard to rebuild her relationship with Clay, but she pushes away her sympathetic old friend, Tia, and her artist mother, Jayla. When Anna finally stitches together the mysterious threads of her past, she is able to accept who she is. After a disappointing confrontation with her birth father, she declares, “My name is Annaka Brooks!” and gets a flash of understanding: “Even though I was a seeker, I was seeking a past that never wanted me. But now I knew who I was, and I knew all the people I carried with me.” (p. 256)

Using plenty of dialogue as well as texting, the story moves quickly. The writing, itself, however, can be uneven. Grammatical constructs, such as the incorrect use of “seen”, “laying” and “sunk”, may be local vernacular, but it is not clearly indicated as dialect and just sounds incorrect. The story also seems to lack cultural context. While Anna and her family are clearly African-Canadian, readers see little of the culture or reality of being black in Canada. Perhaps just her existence as an African-Canadian protagonist creates a new awareness, but one might expect her ethnicity to be a bigger part of her identity.

Fantasy merges smoothly with reality, however, and Annaka remains a thoughtful and emotional reflection on family, identity and home.