This was a really challenging book to read, but I’m glad I did. This is about a mixed-race woman born during Apartheid who leaves South Africa for Botswana. She faces all the expected challenges, and she is also dealing with mental illness and single parenthood. The way this book explores structures of power and how they intersect with each other gave me a lot to think about even if the reading experience wasn’t always easy.

rebcamuse's review against another edition

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4.0

Not a book that is easy to read, but it addresses the isolation of mental illness with depth and sincerity. Bessie Head draws out the universal from racial and cultural lines that we draw for ourselves.

lindseyzank's review against another edition

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4.0

I honestly hated the entire first half of this novel, but once I started, along with Elizabeth, making sense of her nightmares and hallucinations, I discovered the beauty of what Bessie Head is doing with this text. Elizabeth is a Faust-like character in that she figuratively exchanges her sanity and soul for madness and martyrdom. After experiencing three brutal years of mind control at the hands of the fictitious Sello and Dan (who represent both God and the Devil at once in Elizabeth's mind), Elizabeth embraces her suffering, because she sees it as having advanced humanity, and more specifically the town of Motabeng, Botswana, where she goes to escape the brutalities she was experiencing in her native South Africa because of racism. For a woman to suffer such delusions and be so convinced that she will, at an appointed time, commit suicide and leave her young son behind, yet somehow view her suffering as a beautiful lesson, is a remarkable message that Head leaves us at the end. The relationship she develops with the American character Tom is another aspect of this story that I really loved. Half the time, I didn't even know what I had just read, but by the end, Head's intentions were so clear to me that I raced to finish. A truly captivating story about what can happen if you're seen as an outsider in southern Africa because of your mixed race, but also about the redeeming and cleansing places you can go as a result of this marginality.

manaledi's review against another edition

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3.0

The protagonist narrator was insane and the story thus matched her mind on the blurred boundary between dreams and reality. Interesting and confusing.

male_lactation's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

serendipitysbooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

A Question of Power was a challenging read both thematically and structurally. Elizabeth was born in South Africa, the result of a mixed race relationship which was illegal at the time and resulted in a traumatic childhood. After an unhappy marriage she fled to Botswana where she suffered a mental breakdown. Reading about the events contributing to her breakdown was emotionally challenging; keeping track of the plot and distinguishing what was part of Elizabeth’s actual reality and what was the product of her mental turmoil was both intellectually and emotionally challenging. The links between race, oppression and mental illness were clearly shown.

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