This is the tenth and last in a series of posts about novels for young readers that transport American characters into other cultures and countries. For suggesting Escape Under the Forever Sky, thanks to Sharon M. Lawler, MA, MSLS of San Antonio, Texas. And a very sincere thanks to everyone who suggested titles or responded to these posts! I’ve had a fine time doing this.
Escape Under the Forever Sky is a sweet novel, a suspenseful story that’s well-researched and engagingly informative. I didn’t know, for example, that, as author Eve Yohalem writes, “half a million Ethiopian kids die every year from disease and bad nutrition.” Or that “lions don’t want to get into fights with other lions; they roar so other lions will avoid them.” Or that there really was a 12-year-old girl, kidnapped from her village in southern Ethiopia in 2005, who was saved when three wild lions surrounded her and chased her captors away.
Yohalem based her novel on that incident. She invented a 13-year old main character and narrator, Lucy, who is the daughter of the American ambassador in Addis Ababa and is snatched away from an illicit outing with an Ethiopian friend.
Lucy’s a pretty regular teen when we meet her, chafing under her mother the ambassador’s rigid — and, it turns out, quite necessary — protections. She dreams of a freer life (and a village boy in her school), but at the same time she swallows up everything she can learn about African wildlife. In the end, her yearning to be liberated, her knowledge of wild animals and her crush all play a part in her survival. As do some lions. But mainly it’s her amazing resourcefulness, which becomes totally believable, that an ordinary kid could find that inside herself.
When my book The Revealers was being used by a lot of schools, I had the privilege of visiting dozens of middle schools all over the U.S. and talking, sometimes in depth, with hundreds of young adolescents. What I learned, most of all, is that so many of our country’s young people — from every background — are smart, curious, full of dreams and aware of the world. Whether that is more or less so in this age of smartphone absorption I do not know. But the human spirit comes through; you see it, and you draw hope from it.
This is the best thing about Escape Under the Forever Sky. It’s not that this is a great novel; it’s a very good adventure, vividly told, and it absorbs us into a totally different world. And in the process, Yohalem’s narrative lets the resilience, determination and incredible — and generally untapped — capacities of the human spirit come through and envelop us. That’s why this is so worth a read.
Oh ... and you learn about lions. And about colobus monkeys, Swayne’s hartebeest and gelada baboons. And that hyenas, which have the strongest jaws in the animal kingdom, secrete something called “hyena butter” from their butts to mark their territories.
I did not know that.
