![]() ![]() The novel received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal. “Dream Country” moves between the United States and Liberia from 1827 to 2018, following five generations of young people in one African-American family. “In ‘Dream Country,’ I, as an American, am confronting history that has not been confronted.” “It’s fascinating to me, as an African American, that we were the oppressors,” says Gibney, who lives in Minneapolis with her two American-Liberian children. In this story, which took Gibney 20 years to research, think about and write, she exposes a little-known secret embedded in the early days of that West African country - freed American slaves who were early settlers (known as Americo-Liberians or the Congo people) colonized the undeveloped land, pushing indigenous Africans out of the way. “The African-American story cannot be told fully without also telling the Liberian one,” Shannon Gibney says of her new young-adult novel “Dream Country.” It’s a smart, many-layered and sometimes challenging book for smart people who want to learn as they read. ![]()
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