The Association of Foreign Spouses: Their Hopes Lay in the Friendship They Shared [Paperback]

just recieved this book and can't put it down. already i've been taken to another country, i can smell the flowers in the garden and feel the heat from the sun. can't stop i need to read more

After really enjoying Cloth girl I was thrilled to receive Marilyn Heward Mills second novel. I read it in a matter of days and during that time I laughed out loud, cried and managed to get a stiff neck as a result of the tension and anticipation of what was going to happen.

I have never been to Ghana but now feel I have a level of understanding and familiarity of life there. I was subtly educated throughout the book.

You will not be dissappointed, put it in your basket!

In some ways, The Association of Foreign Spouses covers the same sense of isolation, dislocation and injustice - particularly towards females - that Marilyn Heward Mills wrote about so well in her debut novel, Cloth Girl, but there's a crucial difference here. What makes fitting into Ghanaian society different for the foreign wives in her latest book is that they have no social network of diplomats' wives to support and give the benefit of their experience in a country very different to the one back home. When things go wrong - and nothing is straightforward when trying to bring up children or deal with even the most simple of domestic issues in post-independence Ghana during the eighties - they're largely on their own.

The four women in Association of Foreign Spouses, each from very different parts of Europe, each with different expectations from the Ghanaian men they have tied their fates to, do however, as the title suggests, find some kind of solidarity in each other when the going gets tough. And, my goodness, the going gets pretty tough for all of them at one point or another. Although set against the backdrop of a turbulent series of violent military coups that occur during the country's struggle to succeed as an independent nation, the difficult situations that the women have to face are mostly domestic in nature, almost commonplace - which is to say they feel real and stir genuine emotions.

Mills comes down very hard on the male figures in the book. They tend to fall into the familiar types of weak, bullying and unfaithful, exerting the power that Ghanaian society gives them over women, all of them egotistical, greedy and capable of infidelity or brutality at the drop of a hat. If that seems a little anti-men, the females are not perfect either. They have made their mistakes by being too naïve, too idealistic and too trusting, believing in impractical romantic notions of love and ways of bringing up families that could never realistically be achieved in such a place - and they are paying the price for it.

The writing then is deceptively straightforward, but Marilyn Heward Mills gets to the core personality of her characters and finds the most direct manner of expressing it in how they go about their daily lives, bringing together moreover the various predicaments and personalities of each of the women and tying it in well with the social background and the culture of Ghana. Eva's struggle adjust to life in Accra, for example, is reflected in garden she maintains. Despite the difficulties she is determined that it should survive and be fruitful, but her expectations prove to be unreasonable when faced with the realities of life in Ghana. That's perhaps not sufficiently different in tone or subject from Cloth Girl and The Association of Foreign Spouses is not the great leap forward that may have been hoped for, but the author does succeed in demonstrating once again her deep understanding of women's issues, particularly when tied in with the immigrant experience, and she writes about it well, entertainingly and truthfully.

In doing so, the novel can pull some surprises out of all the misery. The one person who comes through better than most is the initially formidable figure of the interfering mother-in-law, Auntie Gee, who ends up being best able to deal with the realities and practicalities at a time when everyone else is losing their head. While The Association of Foreign Spouses can get very emotionally involved in the terrible predicaments of its characters, it's this kind of coolness that is evident also in the writing, allowing the women's stories to rise above the stereotypical elements of the everyday domestic issues and finding the essence of truth in what occurs, unpalatable though it may sometimes be.