saralynnburnett's review against another edition
5.0
I really enjoyed this book. It was so full of heart and it read almost like one of those YA books we all adore (awkward girl meets American school culture, learns to find her way). Keena Roberts is a true inspiration. To be in such a unique position at such a young age and even then to realize what truly matters in life was so fantastic to read about. If you want a book about empowerment / be who you are / bloom where you're planted, and women in STEM fields - this is a great one. When narratives move between two disparate times or locations (in this case Botswana and Philadelphia) sometimes I end up liking one more than the other. This is not the case here. They're both so seamlessly tied to each other and formative in the author’s life it made the entire book an absolute pleasure to read.
kpetroll's review against another edition
4.0
Very good memoir. Hard to believe what she did as a young child and how she used her survival skills both in Africa and America. High recommend this book.
renwar96's review against another edition
4.0
I thought Keena's story was so interesting. I really think she had some wonderful experiences in the African wild while her parents studies the baboons. It was such an untamed, wild world to take two small girls to, the dangers outweighed the great experiences in my opinion. Her parents sometimes treated her like an adult, but that put in her the line of some real dangers. I felt so bad for her trying to blend back into school every time she returned to the states. She tried to hide and not show her true self and that's really sad for a young girl. She loved living in Africa and even wanted to live there alone as a teenager, at least her parents didn't allow that and made her go to college. As she grew older she came to love the US and put her eduction to work trying to help the people of Africa!
nicola323's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
jenniferkey's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
angieinbooks's review against another edition
5.0
I really enjoyed this. The comparisons to Mean Girls is inevitable, of course, and definitely a part of what piqued my interest to read it, but this is not Mean Girls.
What I found most interesting about Keena Robert’s childhood is her annual transition to life in the US after months is near isolation in the middle of a game reserve in Botswana. It’s fairly obvious that Roberts wasn’t particularly keen to dwell on those moments, as they obviously caused a lot of pain. But they way she’s able to describe her time in Baboon Camp is really quite incredible. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like her childhood, but she wrote about it in such a way that I felt like I was right there.
What was unexpected is her grappling with her idea of what Botswana was/is and her relationship to her home in Baboon Camp and the actual borders of what is Botswana. And I liked how much she recognized her privilege.
I wished there was a little update on what happened with her family after her final summer in Baboon Camp, particularly any conversations/observations she and her sister may had about their shared experience. But alas, it doesn’t happen.
Also, thank you, Keena Roberts for introducing me to the absolute jam that is “Gorilla Man.”
Also-also... Bonus points (in my estimation) that this was written by an out queer author. But be warned that the book doesn’t really go into this at all. This isn’t a coming out narrative at all and Roberts barely dwells on her sexuality except to acknowledge it as a fact. But I still loved that it was there.
What I found most interesting about Keena Robert’s childhood is her annual transition to life in the US after months is near isolation in the middle of a game reserve in Botswana. It’s fairly obvious that Roberts wasn’t particularly keen to dwell on those moments, as they obviously caused a lot of pain. But they way she’s able to describe her time in Baboon Camp is really quite incredible. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like her childhood, but she wrote about it in such a way that I felt like I was right there.
What was unexpected is her grappling with her idea of what Botswana was/is and her relationship to her home in Baboon Camp and the actual borders of what is Botswana. And I liked how much she recognized her privilege.
I wished there was a little update on what happened with her family after her final summer in Baboon Camp, particularly any conversations/observations she and her sister may had about their shared experience. But alas, it doesn’t happen.
Also, thank you, Keena Roberts for introducing me to the absolute jam that is “Gorilla Man.”
Also-also... Bonus points (in my estimation) that this was written by an out queer author. But be warned that the book doesn’t really go into this at all. This isn’t a coming out narrative at all and Roberts barely dwells on her sexuality except to acknowledge it as a fact. But I still loved that it was there.
liralen's review against another edition
4.0
Before we left for Botswana, Dad had gone to Barnes & Noble and said to one of the booksellers, “I need books about strong girls, dragons, and adventure, and the longer the better because my daughter already reads too fast.”*
What a delight, start to finish. Roberts' upbringing was one that only a tiny number of people experience: her parents were academics, researchers, and their work took them out into the wilds of Botswana. As a result, Roberts' childhood was split between 'Baboon Camp' and a more prosaic American life. While the students at her US schools were going to after-school soccer and experimenting with lip gloss, Roberts was learning to track baboons and running out of shampoo because the bottle had melted in the summer heat. It was a childhood unlike any other.
And that ended up being one my my favourite things about the book: that just as I was wondering if Roberts had realised that her Botswana childhood was not only unlike a standard US upbringing (whatever that means) but also unlike a standard Botswana upbringing (again, whatever that means), she got to the crux of the matter.
So it's complicated. It's all these wild stories and a dream of a childhood, but also knowing that you identify with a place where you can never truly belong. Recommended. Strongly recommended!
And just for kicks, here are a few moments that made me smile:
They say that everyone has a talent, they just have to discover what it is. I discovered mine the summer I was thirteen. What I am good at is recognizing baboons.
-
The determination of whether or not it was possible to drive to Maun was dependent on Xamashuro and whether it would be forded, and testing this always involved sending a child across before the car to see how deep it was. The tester child would wade across Xamashuro and then come back to stand next to the truck so the adults could see how the water level on our shorts matched up with the wheels.
-
We used the satellite phone to download messages every few days but had to make sure no one sent us any attachments or the system would crash. We could also only get a strong enough signal by standing on top of the Land Rover in the middle of the plain behind camp and holding the sat phone above our heads, which in 2001 felt like a perfectly normal way to check e-mail.
-
When we first arrived in 1992, there was one supermarket [in Maun] that received a shipment of food from South Africa once a week. If you happened to be in line when the truck arrived, you could get fresh fruit and vegetables. If not, you were out of luck until the next week and had to make do with boxed and canned goods. There were no fast-food restaurants, no pharmacies, and only one bank, but its doors were broken and cows often wandered through.
*No page numbers because Overdrive is terrible.
What a delight, start to finish. Roberts' upbringing was one that only a tiny number of people experience: her parents were academics, researchers, and their work took them out into the wilds of Botswana. As a result, Roberts' childhood was split between 'Baboon Camp' and a more prosaic American life. While the students at her US schools were going to after-school soccer and experimenting with lip gloss, Roberts was learning to track baboons and running out of shampoo because the bottle had melted in the summer heat. It was a childhood unlike any other.
And that ended up being one my my favourite things about the book: that just as I was wondering if Roberts had realised that her Botswana childhood was not only unlike a standard US upbringing (whatever that means) but also unlike a standard Botswana upbringing (again, whatever that means), she got to the crux of the matter.
Spoiler
Baboon Camp was four hours away from town by car or boat, and the nearest human settlement to camp was the village where Mokupi lived and even that was more than an hour away. It’s pretty hard to catch diseases from other people if you never see anyone, I explained. No mosquito carrying malaria would ever be able to make it to our camp. So we were fine.
And that’s what struck me the most, sitting there on the Pottery Barn couch on a hot September day. I said I lived in Botswana, but I really didn’t. Not at all. Not in the least. I lived in a world of campfires and tall trees and the scent of dust on the wind, where elephants shuffled quietly beneath palm trees and genet cats came out at night to eat figs, where the baboons sunned themselves on the cold mornings and fought over the wild mushrooms that grew on termite mounds after the rains came. That might have been “Botswana” at some point. But it wasn’t anymore. Real Botswana was the tinny sounds of South African pop played on scratchy tapes in the mall in Maun, the roar of cars on the tarmac, and the ladies with perfect balance carrying jerry cans of water on their heads. It was goats standing on cars to eat leaves, kids running home from school in yellow-and-blue uniforms, and people selling carved hippos at roadside stands. I liked that world, what little I knew of it, but I had no claim on it, not the way I had on Baboon Camp. I had no more business saying I was from Botswana than someone who stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia and had the audacity to say, “Oh yes, I love it here. This is now home! I am now Narnian.” Because at the end of the day, whatever else happened, I was still a white girl born in the US, still the same girl that Masaku said shouldn’t get a beating back in Amboseli because I was different from my friends—a white, American girl whose real home was far away from the elephants and the hyenas.---
As the days went by in one never-ending cloud of dust and lines upon lines of patients at the clinics, it became clear to me that running away to Baboon Camp was an escape that existed only for me and my family, not for anyone else in the world, even the people who actually called Botswana home. The reality of the country’s people and their future was here, in the HIV support groups and the patient nurses working night and day to get people the care they needed, not in a camp in a game reserve where only I, an American, was privileged enough to live. Reality seemed very close and Baboon Camp so impossibly far away.---
I didn’t know much about myself as a seventeen-year-old. I liked being outside, running, and reading. School was terrifying. I didn’t have many friends, and though I had figured out how to wear the right thing at school and not say anything too outlandish, every action was part of a conscious plan not to be seen or reveal anything about who I really was and the gay, wild, loud Botswana part of me that just wanted to scream. If I knew anything about myself in absolute, clear certainty, it was that when those moments came, when it was just me and the lion, out in the wilds of nowhere in the Okavango, I was the one who could handle it—I was the one who would know what to do to keep everyone safe. I’d done it so many times before: from the boat trip to Delta Camp when I was ten to all the changed tires, lion escapes, and elephant charges that I was sure would have killed a less capable person than even teenage me. That was who I was… I’d been waiting for moments like this for years, and when one had finally happened, they hadn’t needed me; selfishly, I felt like that last, final place for me to be me had disappeared.
And just for kicks, here are a few moments that made me smile:
They say that everyone has a talent, they just have to discover what it is. I discovered mine the summer I was thirteen. What I am good at is recognizing baboons.
-
The determination of whether or not it was possible to drive to Maun was dependent on Xamashuro and whether it would be forded, and testing this always involved sending a child across before the car to see how deep it was. The tester child would wade across Xamashuro and then come back to stand next to the truck so the adults could see how the water level on our shorts matched up with the wheels.
-
We used the satellite phone to download messages every few days but had to make sure no one sent us any attachments or the system would crash. We could also only get a strong enough signal by standing on top of the Land Rover in the middle of the plain behind camp and holding the sat phone above our heads, which in 2001 felt like a perfectly normal way to check e-mail.
-
When we first arrived in 1992, there was one supermarket [in Maun] that received a shipment of food from South Africa once a week. If you happened to be in line when the truck arrived, you could get fresh fruit and vegetables. If not, you were out of luck until the next week and had to make do with boxed and canned goods. There were no fast-food restaurants, no pharmacies, and only one bank, but its doors were broken and cows often wandered through.
*No page numbers because Overdrive is terrible.
bluenicorn's review against another edition
3.0
I think this could work for a book club- and it's pretty inoffensive, if there are sensitive readers. I found the parts in Botswana obviously the most fascinating- and I appreciated that the author didn't turn this into some sort of "Ugh, why do I have to go to Baboon camp" angsty memoir. Instead, she acknowledges that it was pretty amazing that she got to go to Africa and spend so much time there. I kind of marveled at some of the choices her parents made, but hey- I can't judge.
heatherbookely's review against another edition
4.0
i really enjoyed listening to this! keena’s childhood was very different from my own, and my heart ached when she was teased in pa but i loved hearing about her adventures. she also examines her privilege and i liked that!