Introduction

When Fiona Sweeney tells her family she wants to do something that matters, they do not expect her to go to Africa to help start a traveling library. But that is where Fiona chooses to make her mark: in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya, among tiny, far-flung communities, nearly unknown and lacking roads and schools, where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease.

In The Camel Bookmobile, Fi travels to settlements where people have never held a book in their hands. Her goal is to help bring Dr. Seuss, Homer, Tom Sawyer, and Hemingway to a largely illiterate and semi-nomadic populace. However, because the donated books are limited in number and the settlements are many, the library initiates a tough fine: if anyone fails to return a book, the bookmobile will stop coming.

Though her motives are good, Fi doesn't understand the people she seeks to help. Encumbered by her Western values, she finds herself in the midst of several struggles within the community of Mididima. There the bookmobile's presence sparks a feud between those who favor modernization and those who fear the loss of the traditional way of life in the African bush. The feud heightens when one young man—'Scar Boy'—doesn't return his books. As promised, the library stops all visits, but Fi goes to the settlement alone, determined to recover what has been lost.

Evocative, seamless, and haunting, The Camel Bookmobile is a powerful saga that challenges our fears of the unknown. It is a story that captures the riddles and calamities that often occur when two cultures collide. It follows an American librarian who travels to Africa to give meaning to her life, and ultimately loses a piece of her heart. In the end, this compelling novel shows how one life can change many, in spite of dangerous and seemingly immutable obstacles.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

February 1989 - Mididima, North Eastern Province, Kenya

Scar Boy

The child, wide-legged on the ground, licked dust off his fist and tried to pretend he was tasting camel milk. Nearby, his father spoke ardently to a thorny acacia while his older brother hurled rocks at a termite mound. Neither paid him any attention, but this didn’t change the fact that for the child, the three of them existed as a single entity. It was as if he drank dust, talked to a tree and threw stones all at once. He took this inclusion, this oneness, for granted. Separate was a concept he was too young to recognize. Nor did he know of change, or fear, or the punishment of drought. All of life was still predictable, and forever, and safe.

Now, for instance, this child-father-brother unit was enveloped in the reliable collapse of day, when the breeze stiffened, color drained from the sky and shadows tinted three sets of cheeks simultaneously. The child welcomed this phase. The texture of the graying light, with its deepening power, transformed faces. It made people, he would later think, resemble charcoal portraits.

Something disturbed this particular dusk, though, tugging his attention away from the intimate comfort of his tongue on his skin and the dust’s piquant flavor. Out of the gloom of nearby bushes rose a rigid, narrow object, standing frozen but quivering. This was odd. Everything in his experience either walked or dashed or flew or was blown by the wind or planted in the ground - in other words, it plainly moved or, less frequently, it didn’t. What could he make of this harsh immobile shuddering, this tense and stubborn suggestion of flexibility? He crawled closer, then sat back to look again.

From this perspective, he spotted another object, small and round to the other’s long and narrow. It was the color of a flame.

In fact, there were two.

“Aha,” he thought with satisfaction, the puzzle starting to shift into place. Eyes. Eyes, of course, moved and stayed still at once and could flicker like fire-light. So the object must be human. Or maybe animal. Or maybe ancestral ghost.

Whatever it was, he understood from somewhere, an inherited memory or intuition, that he needed all of himself to meet it. So he called to his other parts, his father-brother.

“Here I am,” he said, a gentle reminder. Even as he spoke, he didn’t look away from the eyes and the rigid tail; because of that, he saw the object begin to grow larger. And then it lunged. It joined him, as if it too wanted to be part of the son-father-brother entity.

He was unaware of pain. Instead, the moment seemed unreal and confusing, like drifting off to sleep in the midst of one of his father’s sung tales and losing track of the story. What had already happened? What was happening still? He would have to ask his father in the morning.

Only one part remained distinct: the sound that would echo in his mind until death. The wet, high-pitched ripping of his three-year-old flesh as the spotted hyena, never a kind beast and now mad with hunger, dove onto his leg, chomped at his waist and then reached his face and gnawed, grunting with pleasure.

Later he would hear how his father turned, killed the beast with a miraculously aimed knife, scooped his son into his arms and began running, the child’s blood weeping down the father’s arms. He would learn that all this took less than five meditative breaths - but he would never quite believe it. In his memory, the crunching of bone and tearing of flesh stretched over a decade of sundowns and sunups, disrupting all patterns, making everything separate and fearful and dusty and fleeting forever.

The foregoing is excerpted from The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton. All rights reserved. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Author:

1. One of the main conflicts in the book is between the library proponents and those who fear the imposition of Western values and the loss of centuries of tradition. Can The Camel Bookmobile be seen as an allegory for what's still taking place in the world today? Is there a lesson to be learned?

2. What is gained (or lost) by the use of multiple viewpoints to tell this story? How do the various viewpoints weave together to reinforce the theme of books as instruments of change and growth?

3. Each character is changed in some way by the bookmobile. Discuss those changes. Specifically, Fi goes to Kenya convinced that she is bringing knowledge to the African bush, but in the end she learns at least as much as any other character. What are the main lessons she learns?

4. Many of the people of Mididima make it clear that they do not want to be seen as ignorant simply because they are illiterate. At the novel’s end, the traditional values seem to win out. But do you think books and modernism will continue to impact the people of Mididima, even beyond the novel’s conclusion?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	About the Author & Book Tour Info
»	Masha Hamilton's web site
»	Reviews "Rich and evocative"--Library Journal
»	Author Tour Schedule Masha is available to meet with book clubs in tour cities during her book tour and in the tristate area otherwise.

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 2 of 2 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book