Green City in the Sun

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Summary: green city in the sun
Review: Barbara Wood's deep research for her historical novels is once again evident in this rich story of Kenya under British rule and the relationships between the white coffee plantation families and the natives. The main character grows up on one of those plantations and becomes a physician in America who comes back to Kenya when she is summoned to the deathbed of an old native healer whose influence on her life is explored. Readers often lump Barbara Wood with female readers. Wrong! This book, like her "Dreaming", is 100 per cent for both genders.

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Summary: Black and White and Green
Review: Every book I have read by Barbara Wood is an amazing blend of history, romance, complex relationships, and situations fraught with difficulties and problems to solve. Her characters bind you to them as you share their joys and hardships.

The fascinating setting in "Green City" is the early 1900s in Kenya, and involves the conflict between the rich British Treverton family who wants to establish a profitable plantation, and the neighboring tribal medicine woman who curses them for invading her people's land. Tragedies befall the Trevertons, and they struggle through the uprising of the native Kenyans as they defy the British. Complicating things is the romance between the medicine woman's black son and a young white Treverton woman.

Meanwhile, we follow the heroine, Doctor Grace Treverton, who, separating herself from the aspirations for wealth of the rest of her family, dedicates her life to serving the tribes by providing them with medical care and schooling. Yet even this big-hearted and wise woman is not immune to danger from the revolting tribes or from romantic turmoil involving a married man.

Full of romance, danger, and political and family intrigue, this 700-page book never lost my attention for a minute!

Rating:
Summary: Green City In The Sun
Review: I love this book!! I try to read it once a year. It follows two families in the newly colonized British Africa, one British and one native African, through three generations. Their story is moving, easy to follow, and at times brings me to tears. I don't want to give anything away, but if you are looking for a feel good book, then don't buy this one. If you like tragedies that end in triumph, then this is the book for you.

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Summary: Under the sun of Kenya
Review: If you want to know the amazing story of Kenya, you must read this book the only problem I found is that the last 50 pages could be written in 15, but the story keeps you reading all the time.

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Summary: If you enjoy romance novels, you'll love this!
Review: If you've never seen Out of Africa or read any book about Kenya, this novel will give you a cursory overview of Kenyan history from 1919 to the present. It is easy to follow, its characters are uncomplicated, and it certainly never lacks for plot.

Using simple words and very short sentences, Wood presents the interconnected stories of three generations of two families--the African family of a shamba-living, fig-tree worshipping witch doctor and the veddy British Treverton family of aristocrats who have come to Kenya, taken over their land, and, not surprisingly, torn down the sacred fig tree to build a polo field. The British, as exemplified by Lord Treverton, are so arrogant and insensitive in the course of their decades of power, that the local population forms the guerilla Mau Mau secret society, committing all manner of murder and mayhem indiscriminately against both the British and those Kenyans who reject Mau Mau-style violence.

Eventually, of course, the Kenyans win their independence, but not before the reader is confronted with a series of other overtly dramatic and/or sentimental plot elements: a witch doctor putting a curse on the Treverton family, a wife steadfastly rejecting her husband's sexual advances from the beginning of her marriage, two mothers pretending for years that their own children do not exist, a lover hidden successfully for months in the garden, two passionate interracial affairs between "good" characters, a long-unsolved double murder, several suicides, secret betrayals, rapes, imprisonments, numerous love affairs both serious and casual, a gay relationship, and even the belief of a contemporary female doctor, who has straight hair and "creamy skin," that she is half Kikuyu. For good measure, there are also a couple of graphic sex scenes and a series of genital mutilations. The book is so unabashedly sensational and romantic that this reader found herself wishing the Mau Mau had been more successful.

Rating:
Summary: Simply put
Review: This is Barbara Wood's best novel. While some of her other novels tend to be formulaic, and sometimes seem awfully familiar, Green City is all original. A great, long read.

Rating:
Summary: Simply put
Review: This is Barbara Wood's best novel. While some of her other novels tend to be formulaic, and sometimes seem awfully familiar, Green City is all original. A great, long read.