Even though this is a memoir it feels curiously detached and I didn’t feel any connection to the author. Thank you to NetGalley, Monica Macias, and Duckworth Books for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Arriving in the Chinese capital, using her Equatorial Guinean passport, she could find no one who spoke English (which she’d studied at school). Along the way she tried to tell her story and reconcile her personal experience of Francois Macias and Kim Il-sung as kindly men with their Western reputation as brutal dictators. Lacking any actual detail, repeating the same lines about her fathers' innocence without support, and dragging on--not unlike this review--for far too long, Monica Macias' Black Girl from Pyongyang is one I would recommend you skip.

When she came of age, she was offered the chance by Kim Il Sung either to stay or leave, and in the book she documents her decision to leave North Korea and discover her heritage in Spain and Equatorial Guinea, before moving to the US, South Korea and the UK. From the balcony you could see five large buildings arranged around the school’s playing fields, housing a clinic, library, theatre/cinema, gym, canteen, laboratory and dormitory. In her upcoming memoir, she sheds light on her childhood in Pyongyang, and life post-North Korea in Spain, New York, Seoul and London. We sat down on a sofa near his large, neat desk and Director O began to address my sister, as the eldest of the three of us. Given her upbringing as the eponymous black girl from Pyongyang, Macias has an interesting and unique perspective on the world, but I didn't feel that this memoir offered much real insight.Her circumstances growing up are unusual as her father decided to send her and her other siblings to be raised in Pyongyang North Korea from Equatorial Guinea.

I must admit I am not too familiar with her father's story and I don't feel I am fit to talk about much of Guinean's history either although I can agree on her thoughts on decolonisation. Clearly the young Monica struggles, from being a young child separated from her family, from the vigorous education process, and the new culture. It's a life of discovery; I greatly enjoyed the first part of her story, felt the quality of writing dipped a little in the middle before coming back up with her academic studying in London. Monica spent a somewhat confused and happy childhood at a strict, military boarding school in Pyongyang, where she lived a relatively privileged existence as the daughter of a close comrade and friend of Kim Il Sung. Not long after I moved to North Korea to study, my father was put on trial in Equatorial Guinea on 24 September 1979, accused of perpetrating atrocities during his time in office, along with other allegations.She argued that if he had embezzled funds, her mother would not have ended up selling plantains for a living, nor would she have been scrubbing toilets. In 1979 she was sent to school in North Korea with her two siblings, under the protection of Kim Il-sung. Probably the latter is the most difficult thing to perform (even for readers with open minds), as it’s natural that our views would gravitate towards one view or another. A cursory Google will tell you that Francisco Macias developed a cult of personality, a one party system and appointed himself President for life.

However, as an adult my sister showed me a letter that my father wrote to accompany us when we were sent to Pyongyang. Their support enables us to be proudly independent, challenge the whitewashed media landscape and most importantly, platform the work of marginalised communities. Macías also revealed in her book that she has come to take pride in Kim Il Sung as her second father, and that she had to hide her origins when she moved to the West because she was raised by two men known as brutal dictators.She experiences Culture Shock and even feels an alien in her home-countr Once, missing her siblings, who by now had moved to university halls, she ran away in the night, walking for hours to find them, which resulted in a huge dressing-down. After Macias was overthrown in a coup by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang, and put on trial and executed, Castro sent Teo home “to the lions’ den” and Maribel rushed back to defend him. In America people struggled to pay for basic medical treatment, while a visit to Equatorial Guinea taught her that African superstition put up equal barriers to life-saving care.