A blackout leads two teens to discover the intimacy and vulnerability that can only be shared in darkness in Our Beautiful Darkness, a fully illustrated YA novella from celebrated Angolan author Ondjaki and illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.
The light goes out suddenly. And in this absence of light, a pair of teenagers bare their souls. Into the warm silence of the night, they share a conversation filled with their stories and dreams... and maybe even a first kiss.
Set against the backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Angola in the 1990s, this book weaves the country's history with a teenage boy's family stories. But when a power outage shrouds the neighborhood in darkness, everyday realities fade away... As the boy and a girl sit talking in the backyard, memory gives way to imagination and vulnerability, and the space between them becomes charged with emotional electricity.
Their resulting conversation is both a meditation on the storytelling impulse and a gripping narrative of first love that, through its particulars, ascends to the universal.---from the publisher
126 pages 978-1592704101 Ages 14 and up
Keywords: graphic novel, Africa, 20th century, connection, authenticity, being yourself, understanding others, first love, 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year old
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A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024 Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025 A Five Books Best New Book for Teens of 2024
Editor's Note: This title is on the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize Short List 2025
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My library is located in the small city of Portland, Maine, in the northeastern United States; it’s just steps from the North Atlantic. But most days after school, a visitor to our teen room will hear more Portuguese and Lingala than English, as Portland has become a destination for Angolan asylum seekers. Here, over 6,000 miles from the South Atlantic coast where Angola’s capital city, Luanda, sits, these teens and their families are making a new home.
That’s why I was thrilled to discover Our Beautiful Darkness (Uma escuridão bonita) by Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves, translated by Lyn Miller-Lachmann, and published by Unruly/Enchanted Lion, among the submissions for the 2025 GLLI Translated YA Book Prize. It did not give me the keen insight into my young patrons' pasts I'd hoped for, but it did give me an incredibly immersive experience. The titular darkness is caused by a power outage, which creates a singular, protective space for two young people to reveal themselves to each other. It's a rich and sensory text: “In this darkness of sweet melody or warm silence, between the buzz of mosquitoes and the whiff of a match lighting the first candle inside my house, I found the courage to speak,” says the unnamed narrator. Later: “I passed my tongue slowly over my lips. They told me they felt lonely”; and later still: “Here outside in our shared darkness, between the hum of a cricket and the buzz of a firefly, she found the courage to speak.” The intensity of these two teens’ attraction to each other is palpable. Gonçalves’s white-on-black illustrations offer up glimpses of the characters, amplifying the intimacy of their experience within the enveloping darkness.
Alas, it’s the only Ondjaki book published in the United States, and the only one in my library. But Ondjaki has a considerable oeuvre, and thanks to interlibrary loan, I’ve been happily paddling around in some of it for the past several weeks. In them I’ve found the same richness of language but also a sense of fun that’s just hinted at in Our Beautiful Darkness.-Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
Recommended by: Vicky Smith, Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
