PositiveFull Stop...this lack of identity reads radically (not to mention, at present, heretically). Our narrator seems to reflect an under-politicized demo: that kind of person who does not hew to the identities that so many around us embrace, who is steered to lonely conclusions about herself; that she is resistant, impermeable somehow ... As ambitious as this thread feels, the scenes onsite in West Africa are oddly flat. This has less to do with illustrating the paradoxes of aid and pretty much everything to do with Aimee, whose character feels like a mistake ... The novel feels most purposeful when our narrator looks searchingly upon the certainty of others — their sureness of the inextricability of what and who they are; and as it compares her vagueness to their conviction; her sparseness to their fullness.