The Camel Bookmobile
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Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.
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Certain books are allowed to be less than perfect. For example, any book about librarians or book collecting or even writing is such a welcome publishing event that I give it some slack; just the mere fact that someone decided to choose these as subjects is enough to allow the author some latitude. The Camel Bookmobile, consequently, I have let the belt out a couple of notches. The writing is acceptable. The characters shimmy up against stereotype here and there. The author lets the genuine details appear now and then and the book shines. I worried through the first few chapters, concerned the author was trying to make a point, change the world, but she got bigger as the novel moved along and showed both the dark and the light. The chief librarian seemed thin throughout; surely time in England would have developed his character a bit more? I ended up deciding to like the book, despite its small flaws. It is, after all, the story of the power of words on lives.
