Rejected & Blessed is Anderea Morara’s second novel. His first novel, The Sting, has been adopted by many secondary schools as a crucial reader. Rejected & Blessed is set in East Africa, but cast in a global context with the primary purpose of highlighting the human aspects of the continuous cultural transformation from the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras as well as the global political economy. The novel tells the dramatic and traumatic love story in which the clash of cultures in the context of rapid social change, makes it awfuly difficult to determine right from wrong.
This book gives a glimpse of how this transition affected and is affecting, communities in the region and the resultant coping strategies as well as the effects of the associated coping mechanisms, especially in the realm of love, marriage and child-rearing. On the global scene, the subtle dynamics of economic hegemony, foreign aid, brain drain, racism and cultural dialectics are glossed on.