Botswana is here:
Here's the very glowing summary:
Emily (16), Travers (10), Angus (9), Maisie (7) and Oakley (1) lived in an idyllic 300-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. They attended the local school, watched TV and did all the things English middle-class children do. Then, in 1995, their biologist mother seized the opportunity to study lions in Botswana and, in the space of 3 months, changed the family's lives forever. Within 24 hours of landing in Gaborone they were travelling to their new home at Maun in the Okavango Delta, one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. Weeks after arriving, the children had made home in an old mission house full of stray dogs and were learning to fetch fresh water, dig a toilet and which creepy crawlies could kill you and which couldn't. Their classroom was an open hut and free days were spent in a Land Rover tracking prides of lions across hundreds of miles of bush. The Lion Children is an extraordinary life-enhancing story about the joy of childhood and living in an environment as different as it can be. But above all it is about the lions, who we get to know through the eyes of the children themselves. This story will capture the public's heart and imagination. It is illustrated with the children's own drawings and photographs taken over the 5 years.
I was less than excited about this book even as I was ordering it. I've been trying to stick to books that are set in the country as well as authored by a native, but I just couldn't get one here. So I felt a little bit cheated, and that may have soured my reading from the get-go.
So the stories themselves were interesting enough, but I just kept feeling like I would hate these kids if I met them in real life. I'm going to get on my liberal high horse and say the amount of middle-class white privilege seeped through the pages, and that was one of the things I've really been trying to avoid with this reading adventure.
I mean let's look at the entire reason of this book: this mother decided, kind of on a whim, to uproot her family and move to Africa...to an entirely different continent. For a huge number of people on the planet, this wouldn't even be imaginable. So she had this disposable income to move seemingly quickly with what appeared to be no clearcut plan. From what I gathered, it sounded like she just kind of fell into the lion thing. They move to a few different areas, obviously none of which are luxury, but they're still kind of separated from the villagers and, though finances are tight, have no problem getting what they need.
The kids are vegetarian athiests and eventually get homeschooled, none of which are bad things, but they seem so pretentious about it. Again, this might just be me reading into it with prejudice. At one point the little girl is talking about missing her friends in England and can't understand why they just don't come visit--all they need is money for a ticket, afterall! Granted, she's still pretty young at the time of writing so she may not really appreciate the expense of traveling from England to Botswana, but I rolled my eyes so hard.
Again, the stories about the animals and living in Botswana were interesting, I just...meh. On the whole I felt like this wasn't the best option for this country. I still feel cheated.
Um I was a little late in ordering the upcoming country books (also I read a lot more on vacation than I'd expected) and I don't have my next one yet. :( So I've no idea when I'll have another "review" for you guys, but I'll post if/when anything exciting happens!
No comments:
Post a Comment