Red Dust Road - Supernormal Reads

Paperback, 322 pages

Published 2017 by Picador, Pan Macmillan UK.

ISBN:: 978-1-5098-5839-2

(1 review)

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, the journey that Jackie Kay undertakes in Red Dust Road is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book shining with warmth, humour and compassion, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that our internal landscapes are as important as those through which we move. Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is revelatory, redemptive and courageous, unique in its voice and universal in its reach. It is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny, and love.

3 editions

ralentina reviewed Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay

I want to have tea with Jackie Kay

4 stars

I read this book year ago and, if you had asked me, I would have said it's a book about Kay's experience growing up black in Scotland, and then embarking on a quest to trace her birth parents. I suppose this is more or less what the official blurb suggests. On this second read, I found that these two threads are kind of secondary, and the book could instead be described as an exploration of what it means to be a daughter. Kay loves his adoptive parents to bits, and that love really shapes her memory of the past (the way they stood up for her in every way they could), her experience of the present (her conflicting emotions getting meeting her birth parents and coming to terms with how insubstantial a relation genetics is), and her outlook on the future (as she sees herself taking on more and more …

I read this book year ago and, if you had asked me, I would have said it's a book about Kay's experience growing up black in Scotland, and then embarking on a quest to trace her birth parents. I suppose this is more or less what the official blurb suggests. On this second read, I found that these two threads are kind of secondary, and the book could instead be described as an exploration of what it means to be a daughter. Kay loves his adoptive parents to bits, and that love really shapes her memory of the past (the way they stood up for her in every way they could), her experience of the present (her conflicting emotions getting meeting her birth parents and coming to terms with how insubstantial a relation genetics is), and her outlook on the future (as she sees herself taking on more and more of a caring role in relation to her aging mum and dad). In many ways, the book is not particular complex in its plot, language or insights, but it just gives one a warm feeling, and Kay seems so fucking lovely!