Hmm! Nana Awere Damoah – the man to watch. His Tales from Different Tails is a-must read for both the young adult and adult. I spent the whole of Saturday reading this wonderful collections of short stories in between tidying up the house, cooking for the week and attending to the kids’ homework and what a read!
To simply say that Awere Damoah’s collection is campus based love stories intended to send the reader through nostalgic journeys, or intended to make the reader wish that he had been in the university to taste of the experiences described would be an injustice to the author, because the stories are more than that. More often than not, couples who meet on university campuses and fall in love end up marrying after they leave campus and it is only fair to conclude that, Awere is justified in basing his love stories on the university campus.
However, Awere’s collections also touch on compassion, hurt, betrayal, loyalty, trust, friendship poverty, evil and courage; these are traits or characteristics that drive the human will and actions. Beautifully lacing all these together is humour and fun.
Awere’s use of language relaxes the reader, taking him to familiar sites where they meet your everyday kind of person. The narrative is straightforward, yet deep, interspersed with rich proverbs and anecdotes reflecting the author’s deep insight and knowledge of the Ghanaian culture and traditions. Again, bits of the local dialects Twi and Ga, sprinkled in the narrative with the English language creates in the reader an identifiable connection with the plots/themes. The campus lingua in the narrative of the campus scenes is a bonus that had me reeling.
In October Rush, I had a lot of fun reliving campus days at Legon. I can recall the ‘inte’ and ‘exte’ dating, and the adrenalin charged young men trooping to Volta hall to swim in the lake. However, one cannot help but admire Awere for bringing up the hypocrisy of some ‘chrife’ students and how they sometimes misinterpret God’s directive’s and messages for their own ends.
Continue reading Celestine Nudana’s review on her blog: Reading Pleasure
Nana A Damoah 
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