Digging stars A novel

In her second novel, following House of Stone (2019), Tshuma explores the effects of colonization and familial disharmony, using astronomy as a metaphor and focal point to tell the story of a young Ndebele woman struggling to belong. Athandwa Rosa Siziba is the daughter of a brilliant New York--based scientist who used Indigenous astronomy for applications in cutting-edge technology. "Digging for Stars" is the translated term for the IsiLimela, also known as the Pleiades, which in Africa signaled the planting season. After his sudden passing, grieving Athandwa (a true daddy's girl) develops anxiety attacks she calls "The Terrors." She decides to follow in her father's footsteps and move to New York from Zimbabwe to study astronomy. She finds a group of similar-minded cohorts and reconnects with her stepbrother whom she had terrorized years earlier. Satire kicks in as readers follow Athandwa's progress in her gifted fellowship program as she encounters discrimination, misunderstandings, and petty rivalries. She later discovers some uncomfortable truths that shatter her ideas about ambition and success as well as her fervent idealization of her father.

Zimbabwe-born Tshuma explores astrophysics and the politics of both Africa and the U.S. through the lens of a young physicist whose memories of her dead father have shaped her life. In Athandwa Rosa Siziba's memory, her father, Frank, is heroic: a renowned professor and astronomer who traveled to the International Space Station, a philosopher whose cryptic stories inspired as much as they mystified her. The hard truth is, Athandwa barely knew him. He moved to America shortly after her birth, leaving her with her mother in Zimbabwe. When she was 11--a year before he died--she paid her single visit to him in New York. The memory remains indelible 12 years later when she arrives to do graduate study in the same elite science program he attended. Soon her romantic notions of the U.S. are challenged by uncomfortable questions concerning race, political consciousness, and scientific ethics. In Zimbabwe, tribal membership categorized Athandwa's identity, not the color of her skin. But as her new boyfriend points out, "Here in America, you're Black." (He himself is Haitian, the son of Frank's former lover, and he too worshipped Frank.) Politics here can't be separated from science. Expect to learn about fungi and Greek astronomy as well as Frank's philosophic musings on Bantu geometries as an answer to what he called "Euclidean austerity." Meanwhile, the issue of identity takes a different shape in the unsolved mystery of why an idealist scientist like Frank was closely connected to an obscenely rich military entrepreneur and a sinister Zimbabwean political operative. At heart Tshuma's novel is about Athandwa's personal struggle to find herself as "The Terrors" that have troubled her since Frank's death build toward a crisis. Observant, ambitious, obedient, stubborn, also at times purposely oblivious--what a thorny mix she is. Tshuma's novel is cerebral yet passionate, a heady stew of science, family drama, and political intrigue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.