Wild Life
Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight meets Mean Girls in this funny, insightful fish-out-of-water memoir about a young girl coming of age half in a "baboon camp" in Botswana, half in a ritzy Philadelphia suburb.
Keena Roberts split her adolescence between the wilds of an island camp in Botswana and the even more treacherous halls of an elite Philadelphia private school. In Africa, she slept in a tent, cooked over a campfire, and lived each day alongside the baboon colony her parents were studying. She could wield a spear as easily as a pencil, and it wasn't unusual to be chased by lions or elephants on any given day. But for the months of the year when her family lived in the United States, this brave kid from the bush was cowed by the far more treacherous landscape of the preppy, private school social hierarchy.
Most girls Keena's age didn't spend their days changing truck tires, baking their own bread, or running from elephants as they tried to do their schoolwork. They also didn't carve bird whistles from palm nuts or nearly knock themselves unconscious trying to make homemade palm wine. But Keena's parents were famous primatologists who shuttled her and her sister between Philadelphia and Botswana every six months. Dreamer, reader, and adventurer, she was always far more comfortable avoiding lions and hippopotamuses than she was dealing with spoiled middle-school field hockey players.
In Keena's funny, tender memoir, Wild Life, Africa bleeds into America and vice versa, each culture amplifying the other. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Wild Life is ultimately the story of a daring but sensitive young girl desperately trying to figure out if there's any place where she truly fits in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts's refreshing, upbeat debut is a rollicking memoir of girlhood adventure and matter-of-fact bravery. Raised by university professors and primatologists who conduct field research half the year, Roberts straddled two worlds: the African bush and a Philadelphia private school. When she was eight, her family moved to Baboon Camp, a research outpost in a watery delta of Botswana, where she learned to read the freshness of leopard, impala, and lion prints to determine "how careful I needed to be." At 10 she piloted a motorboat on a two-hour mission past elephants, hippos, and crocodiles and is rewarded with a beer. Roberts writes with humor and kindness throughout, especially as she examines white privilege and the cultural differences of the Botswanans. Back in the U.S. she missed "the comforting familiarity of hyenas whooping and zebras calling," and objected to going to class "when I heard that school was an inside activity." Attending school in Philadelphia as an avid fantasy reader, she shied in the face of bullies: "America was not a safe place for me... I had to lie low and let the danger pass." When she was accepted to Harvard, a competitive classmate said, "You don't deserve to go," calling her upbringing "an unfair hook... to get something you haven't earned." Resilient and resourceful, Roberts celebrates an unorthodox life in this endearing memoir.
