Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood by Robyn Scott

From the Publisher

A glorious new voice on Africa, Robyn Scott's adventures growing up in Botswana in a loving but eccentric family will be one of the season's most talked-about memoirs.

Publishers Weekly

In 1987, Scott's parents ended "a peripatetic decade" through South Africa, England, and New Zealand, and returned to Botswana with seven-year-old Robyn and her younger siblings. Her mother is a dedicated homeschooler ("Children learn best in unstructured situations, when they don't know they're learning"); her father is a doctor, who often serves "more than one hundred patients a day." Grandpa Ivor, a former ace bush pilot, whose later ventures include coffin making, and Grandpa Terry, the personnel manager of a mine, are both great storytellers. Taut and coherent vignettes breathe life into the characters, and Scott's own storytelling skill renders childhood ventures (breaking a horse, falling into a thornbush, distributing Christmas bags) with remarkable immediacy and liveliness. There are snakes, metaphorical and real, though the former rarely intrude upon the child's idyllic world. The real snakes provide moments "where we never knew what we'd learn, only that it would be interesting." A venomous puff adder serves as anatomy lesson, and her mother turns "the death of a juvenile brown house snake into an exhilarating philosophical lecture." Happy stories are hard to tell, but Scott succeeds in this engaging recreation of a child's Botswana, apolitical and Eden-like. She has no sordid revelations, no shocking surprises-just a raconteur's talent for making any story she tells interesting. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Vigorous recollections of a youth spent among "profoundly fringy" adults "in the middle of nowhere."Scott moved with her idiosyncratic parents from New Zealand to Botswana in 1987, when she was almost seven years old. In minute detail, she sketches the landscape, the people she encountered and the innumerable problems that beset her family. She paints her wanderlust-stricken parents as singular human beings with a deep desire to avoid mundanity at any cost. Her father was "an accidental doctor": Cape Town University in his native South Africa didn't offer courses in his preferred field, veterinary medicine, so he had to settle for ministering to human beings. His wife, who grew up in Botswana, shared his belief in alternative medicine and home schooling. Together they roved from London to Cape Town to Auckland before settling with their three children in Botswana. Right next door was inimitable Grandpa Ivor, a World War II veteran of the South African Air Force, pressed into service to fly his son to the area's remote bush clinics until Dad got a pilot's license. Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry, Mum's parents, also played key roles in the author's life. Following some brief passages explaining her parents' globetrotting exploits, Scott unleashes astonishing stories about her Botswana childhood: Their first residence was a dilapidated cowshed; the cow died from eating plastic bags; her dad sometimes drank his own urine, etc. After the family moved to their own farm in the early '90s, home schooling gave way to a conventional education, which the author describes as "boring." (It would be, compared to her family.) The book's most moving passages delineate her tireless father's heroicadventures as an ill-equipped doctor. They range from an extraordinary tale about a man who somehow inserted a ten-centimeter-long snake's tail into his penis to accounts of the author's mercurial, ceaselessly inventive work with AIDS patients. A colorful, occasionally shocking fish-out-of-water memoir. Agent: David Godwin/David Godwin Associates

Product Details

• ISBN: 1594201595
  
• ISBN-13: 9781594201592
• Format: Hardcover, 464pp
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Pub. Date: March 2008
• Sales Rank: 72,579

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents