The Seasons of Beento Blackbird Book

Writing under the name Beento Blackbird, Solomon Wilberforce writes bestselling books that reconnect Africa's children around the world with their glorious heritage.

Solomon's own personal life, however, is curiously disconnected. He spends his winters on Cape Corcos Island with the midwife who brought him into the world when she was only nine years old. In the spring he travels to New York to be with his beautiful and ultra-modern literary agent. His summers are spent with an innocent woman-child in a native village in Ghana. But when his father dies, Solomon is forced to break this cyclical pattern to attend the funeral, and all of the neat compartments of his life begin to tumble in on one another.

Publishers Weekly

Unabashedly sentimental and preachily uplifting, Busia's sprawling first novel maps the physical, erotic and spiritual migrations of Solomon Wilberforce. Under the pseudonym of Beento Blackbird, Solomon is a gifted writer of children's books that enlighten black children all over the world about their rich African cultural roots. A blend of American, Caribbean and African antecedents, he's the walking embodiment of the multicultural African diaspora. He seems to have it all and then some: genius, charisma, great looks and the devotion of three women. Solomon spends winters on the Caribbean island of Cape Corcos with Miriam (nine years his senior) and summers in Ghana with his young bride, Ashia. In New York, his literary agent, a woman named Sam, has been in love with him for years, completely unaware of his other lives. Busia enriches her narrative with glimpses of her native Ghana and scenes in London and New York. Too often, however, she mistakes purple prose for lyricism and sentimentality for true feeling. Only late in the story, when the precarious balance of Solomon's life goes awry, do the characters experience anything remotely resembling a convincing crisis. And even then, the resolution lacks gravity. At one point, Busia writes that Solomon's "inner child was eager to come out and show him how to lead the children into a bright new world." This is book is written with a similar, wide-eyed eagerness. (Oct.)