Better Angels: A Parable (2015)

What do you do when you are trapped but can simply walk out the door? Akosua is a young woman who moves to Canada from Ghana to work for Leila and Greg Tate as a nanny/housekeeper in their beautiful Toronto home. Leila tries to start and complete the novel she’s always wanted to write while her husband continues to work overtime for his demanding boss. Lonely, but determined to finish what she started, Leila tries to befriend her new domestic and arrives at a novel idea derived from Akosua’s stories of her homeland. Pressing for compensation and getting excuse after excuse Akosua finds herself in an impossible situation: she has become a statistic, joining more than 27 million people trapped in modern day slavery. Does Leila miss her high- powered job? Is Greg cheating again? Taking cues from Anansi, the West African spider god, Akosua teases out the answers and uses them to turn the tables on her friendly captors. Gwendolyn MacEwen, cultural appropriation and questions around forced labour come together in Better Angels: A Parable and turns it on its head by incorporating a little bit of fairy tale and magic realism into an all too common problem plaguing the modern world. They’re not called invisible handcuffs for nothing; sometimes the princess in the castle is just another prisoner. Think slavery is over? Think again. (summerworks.ca)