MARK OF THE LION (Suzanne Arruda)

I am not a fan of big game.  I have never enjoyed circuses or zoos and I just hate it when I come across one of those nature shows where lions hunt down innocent antelope and tear them to shreds before our eyes.  Once, while riding the commuter bus to Hartford, I looked up from my book and was stunned to see a TIGER looking back at me from the circus truck in the next lane.  Our eyes actually met!  That's an experience that has stayed with me all my life.  Predators scare me.  I wonder if that tiger remembers the look on my face?

That being said, I have a definite love/hate relationship with this book.  You already know what I hated: the throat-tearing, flesh-eating, growling lions and hyenas, the stampeding, bone crushing elephants and rhinos  AND the fact that humans pursue them for sport.  The thing about Arruda's novel, though, is that the writing is so compelling that I could, for the most part, overlook the distasteful aspects of life and tourism in Kenya.  Set in 1919, Arruda incorporates many subtle but detailed references to the fashion, manners, and attitudes of the post WWI era that sets the stage for development of relationships among the various characters.  Her heroine, Jade Del Cameron, is a modern woman on a quest to fulfill her dead love David Worthy's last request: to find his half brother, who is most probably in Kenya.  Jade suffers a bit from PTSD after her experiences driving an ambulance in France during the war, but she is a self-sufficient, accomplished sharp-shooting mechanic who is also a talented writer and exotically beautiful.  She arrives in Kenya as a reporter for The Traveler, combining her work assignment with her quest to locate the mysterious "Abel" Worthy and to unravel the mystery behind the death of David's father, Gil Worthy, a few years before.  During the course of the story, Jade manages to divert a charging rhino by waving a blanket matador style, shoot an attacking hyena dead, repair a carburetor, cut a friend's hair into a modern bob with a pocket knife, and solve the problem of a dry radiator by suggesting that the men in the safari party "relieve themselves" into the radiator in order to avert a dangerous and time-consuming trip to the river for water.  Enough said!

No matter how distasteful I found the details of life among the wild beasts of Africa and the safari, I cannot deny the absolute beauty of the African wilderness.  Arruda brings the continent to life with her descriptions of Mount Kilimanjaro, lions lurking in the high grasses, the blue African sky, and more.  I wouldn't even attempt to do justice to her verbal illustrations of the beauty of this untamed land and its people or to her character development, which is intriguing as well.  I've said before that one of the marks of a truly good book is that it stays with you after you have finished the last page.  That is certainly true here.  I feel as if I have been on safari myself and the memories will stay with me for a while.