Kim, 13, has very mixed feelings about spending the summer in South Africa. She is excited to be visiting her mother’s homeland (which her mother, a journalist, left for Canada just before Kim’s birth) and to be meeting relatives for the first time. But her mother is also going to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and Kim is nervous about how risky this might be.

Kim is also hoping to finally get her mother to tell her something about her father, whom she’s never even seen a picture of, but who seems integral to her mother’s decision to leave South Africa. Kim quickly gets tangled up in the tensions surrounding her mother’s uneasy reconciliation with her estranged family as well as the almost unbearable suffering that’s the heart of the testimony at the hearings. With the help of Themba, the son of a former family servant, Kim learns about her family history, and comes to understand why truth matters.

There’s an awful lot going on in Colleen Craig’s first novel. At its best, it bravely tackles a difficult subject and tries to make sense of the wounds left by apartheid on all South Africans, black and white. Through the stories Kim’s mother hears as a journalist, the family stories told by Kim’s uncle and grandfather, and the stories Kim hears from Themba, readers are able to see just how difficult a task the Truth and Reconciliation Commission faced in trying to build a new South Africa.

Kim’s personal history is part of that bigger picture, but it doesn’t ring as true as it should. That’s partly because (spoiler alert!) it’s a little hard to believe that Kim could be the child of mixed-race parents and not be aware of any physical traits she’s inherited from her father, especially when they are so clearly evident to her cousins and Themba as soon as they meet her. Kim, who often seems much younger than 13, also seems too naïve to be the child of a single mother who is not at all overprotective. Perhaps the problem is that Craig isn’t entirely sure who her audience is – while the novel’s themes will definitely engage older readers, the character of Kim herself makes this novel more for ’tweens than teens.