When Gloria, a 16-year-old Ghanaian, more or less flunks junior high school a friend of the family arranges for her to become a nanny for a doctor with a two-year-old son. Stuff does happen in this novel--good things and fair amount of bad things, but it mostly feels like a character development story.
It's neat that the author, trained as a doctor in Ghana and now living in Canada, writes from the perspective of the nanny, not the doctor, and portrays the doctor as resistant to leaving Ghana because she wants to stay there and make it better.
If you know how I am, then you'll also know that I appreciated that the novel is mostly about women. The doctor's doctor husband is in England most of the time, Gloria's father is left behind in Accra, and though there are some love interests, the tale is really about Gloria and her relationships and personal development.