When It’s Your Turn for Midnight

Gr 9 Up–After an explosive confrontation at home upends 15-year-old Chianti’s life, she hitchhikes from her parents’ home in Harare, Zimbabwe to her Ambuya’s (grandmother’s) house in Mutare. Ambuya lives on a quiet cul-de-sac with her best friends as neighbors: all of them fought together in Zimbabwe’s war for independence. Now, the group of gogos (elderly women) run a business modifying bulk secondhand clothing and selling it online. Recruited to star in their TikToks, Chianti spends hours talking with the gogos and listening to their stories about the war—yet she’s often frustrated by how evasive their answers to her questions are. She spends her free time rifling through boxes of old photographs and documents to piece together their past, even as she struggles to make sense of her own family’s conflicts in the present. This is a quiet, lyrical novel about the price of war and the meaning of family best suited for thoughtful, introspective readers. As in Musariri’s first young adult novel, All That It Ever Meant, the rich and complex family relationships drive the narrative. However, its brevity detracts somewhat from a full exploration of its complex themes, and the ending feels overly neat. A glossary at the end defines Zimbabwean terms.