A Ladder of Bones

In interwoven stories, “Ladder of Bones” tells a series of tales set in West Africa, Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. Siaka becomes a child soldier in Sierra Leone after being forced to kill his six-year-old brother. Melvin witnesses the murder of his parents by young Liberian soldiers. Timothy, a young boy, survives by feeding on his dead mother's breast, while Iona, a rebellious Jamaican girl, narrowly escapes rape by her mother's drug-addicted lover. Then there's Enilolobo: a mysterious kid who shows up on a Canadian street one day with two buttons. Their lives are intertwined, but this fabric unravels when they return to the land of West Africa as young men. They are forced to relive the nightmare of their former lives when one of them joins others to hunt them down, seeing them not as humans but as a repository of rage.