Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda.  This book is based on a true story of 19 white men and black women in a 1970s South African township who werearrested and tried for miscegenation until the international media found outand threw out the case.  It follows the story of one of the women, and thebiracial daughter she gave birth to as a result of this rape.It is an extremely fascinating book because it is written by a South Africanauthor, and the characters hold the values of the environment they grew upin.  No attempt is made to view the story through a Western lens.  When themain character is a teenager, it's practically normal for her and herfriends to be taken into a field and raped by white men, and the matter isdescribed in the tone in which one describes a minor life annoyance, likemosquitoes or missing the bus.  She doesn't even learn the word for rapeuntil 20 years later.  The only anger that mother or daughter feel is thedaughter's frustration at her appearance, at having hair on her legs whenmost black women don't, and having to put up with schoolyard taunts forbeing "coloured" (even this is treated like it's normal).  The unfairness, hypocrisy and double standards of the apartheid aren't even mention.  Doublestandards in action are described left and right, yes, but it's nevermentioned that this is a double standard. However, because of all this, I didn't much enjoy the book.  First of allthere's the problem of reading repeated rape and sexual harassment scenes.They are essential to the story, they are no more graphic than they need tobe (in fact, they are far less graphic than they need to be), but having to read rape is upsetting, and takes away from my enjoyment of a novel. Also, my milquetoast pablum-fed psyche wanted some kind of happy ending, revenge, justice, reparations for all the cruelty and humiliation the main charactershad to put up with!  But ultimately, there was nothing. A slight semi-demi-maybe-sorta redemption for one of the unpleasant characters, relatively painless natural or unrelated deaths for one or two others. Other than that, life just quietly went on.In summary, very important, very interesting, but not quite comfy recreational reading.