by Elspeth Huxley
The Flame Trees of Thika is the suggested travel or adventure book for Africa in Level 5 Year 2 (tenth grade) in the Mater Amabilis™ high school beta plans (available in the high school Facebook group).
It's a memoir of the brief time the author lived in Kenya with her parents as colonial settlers from Britain in the early 1900s, until life was interrupted by World War I. Her youth and naivety allow her to unabashedly share the vibrant wildlife and tribal life. Beautifully written, it evokes a past era, one we may be able to appreciate as we also learn to recognize its mistakes and prejudices.
For until you actually saw it and travelled across it on foot or on horseback or in a wagon, you could not possibly grasp the enormous vastness of Africa.Because it is a memoir of colonial times, many of the relationships between the white settlers and the Africans may be unsettling for modern readers. There are also a few instances of language we would consider exceptionally insulting and degrading. High schoolers, especially homeschooled students, who may be unfamiliar with this kind of language, may need to be explicitly taught about these kinds of words and their meaning in today's world.
The writing is beautiful:
The sunset was, indeed, spectacular. The whole western sky was aflame with the crimson of the heart of a rose. Deep-violet clouds were stained and streaked with red, and arcs of lime-green and saffron-yellow swept across the heavens. It was all on such a scale that the whole world might have been burning.Though a young child, she was allowed to wander quite a lot. Her memories of the natural world of her youth perfectly suit a Charlotte Mason homeschooler comparing life in Africa with his or her own life.
One morning I surprised two dikdik in the glade, standing among grass that countless quivering cobwebs had silvered all over, each one -- and each strand of every cobweb -- beaded with dew. It was amazing to think of all the untold millions of cobwebs in all the forest glades, and all across the bush and plains of Africa, and of the number of spiders, more numerous even than the stars, patiently weaving their tents of filament to satisfy their appetites, and of all the even greater millions of flies and bees and butterflies that must go to nourish them; and for what end, no one could say.There is little excitement in the book. She's too young to participate in many of the big adventures like a lion hunt. The book records a child's daily life and her views of the farm and African people. There's not much plot or even much closure at the ending, just the wistful hope of a young girl to return to Africa after the war. She does return; her memoir continues in The Mottled Lizard, which I haven't read.
This was a lovely book to read. I haven't decided yet if it's going to be assigned reading for tenth grade. The plans recommend this as a travel or adventure book that would be read and narrated once a week. I'm more inclined to assign it as independent reading without narration (though we do use a reading journal, so there would be a few words jotted down...First Son uses the fewest words he possibly can...with abbreviations). I think I'd like to find something more "adventurous" but so far the few options I've skimmed from our library are a bit too adventurous - violent adventures and survival stories.
This post contains my own opinions. I have received nothing in exchange for writing it, though the links to Amazon above are affiliate links. I requested my copy through PaperBackSwap.com (another affiliate link).
