Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Above the bush, the pink and orange streaked sky had faded to gray..." (more)
Key Phrases: mopane worms, cattle posts, Grandpa Ivor, Tull Block, Granny Betty (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.)
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From Booklist

For a white child in Botswana on the borders between South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s, home is an adventure in paradise, with horses, snakes, crocodiles, baobab trees, starry nights, and more. Growing up “on the fringe,” Robyn and her siblings are homeschooled by their independent mother, who argues all the time with her physician husband, who flies around to rural clinics and argues with his eccentric dad. Robyn’s dream is to go to school, but when she finally does in neighboring Bulawayo, it is not what she expected, including the raging racism. Immensely privileged as they are, her family is not prejudiced (Mum hates being called Madam), and they are aware of the power struggles and disasters, whether it is the diamond boom (for a very few) or the devastation of AIDS (for many). But nature is the story in this idyllic memoir, and not as background. Out of Africa fans will be enthralled. --Hazel Rochman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (March 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594201595
• ISBN-13: 978-1594201592
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #293,933 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OUR VOTE FOR BEST NON-FICTION DEBUT OF 2008, April 17, 2008

By	Philip Bevis "Arundel Books" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Arundel Books is an Independent Bookstore in Seattle. Our staff believes that this is the BEST Non-Fiction Debut of 2008.

Robyn Scott's Twenty Chickens for a Saddle is an astonishing debut. Set in Botswana, it is her account of growing up with one of the most wonderfully mad families you are likely to meet, whether in real life or between the covers of a book.

She has a remarkable ear for language, and a descriptive prose style that brings the bush country of Botswana, with all its flora, fauna, and people, to magically madcap life. Twenty Chickens for a Saddle brings to mind such authors as James Herriot and Augusten Burroughs.

This is our pick as the best non-fiction debut for 2008. It is insightful, inspiring, and heartwarming. Her parents, grandparents, siblings, neighbors, and the countryside surrounding them, are truly brought to life. Given Miss Scott's parents decidedly non-traditional approach to child rearing, this book will offer sustenance to parents of home schoolers everywhere.

Whether you like to read about travel, foreign cultures and peoples, families, education, natural history, biographies, accounts of coming-of-age, Africa, science, Horatio Algeresque narratives, women's studies, health and medicine, flying... or just like a darned good book, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle is for you.

If this truly remarkable book is any indication, Miss Scott has an astonishing career ahead of her, and we are looking forward to her future efforts. Make no mistake, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle stands as an equal with the very best non-fiction published by any author in 2008.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strangely nostalgic, June 1, 2008

By	Graham Surrey (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After finishing this book I was left with a rather strange feeling of nostalgia for someone else's childhood. In part I think that's a testament to the quality of the writing, as the setting of rural Botswana, and the many colourful characters encountered in the book, are rendered with a vividness and eye for detail such that you almost feel like you've been there.

The other aspect was a recognition that the type of childhood described in the book is all too rare. What kid wouldn't want to grow up in Africa being free to ride horses through the bush, keep snakes and monkeys as pets, and swim in rivers with crocodiles?

The darker side of life in southern Africa is referred to as well, with entrenched racism, the looming economic collapse in Zimbabwe and the spectre of the AIDS epidemic described in anecdotes that bring home the personal impact of these issues far more effectively than statistics and news reports can.

Overall this book serves as a great memoir of a unique childhood and a window into an Africa that many never get to see.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Coming of Age Story of a Girl and a Country, July 4, 2008

By	Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org) - See all my reviews

While set in Botswana and praised by Alexander McCall Smith as a "striking portrait of one of the world's most beguiling countries," the deeper subject of Twenty Chickens for a Saddle turns out not to be Africa at all. Rather, Robyn Scott has written a searching portrait of the limits of individualism and an exploration of education in its several forms.

Ordinarily, the problem with being idiosyncratic is that there you are, all by yourself. In this story, however, there's an entire clan of stark, raving individuals who totally delight one another and somehow come together as a family of eccentrics. I knew a family much like them when I lived in Botswana for three years in the 1970s, learning to speak Setswana.

What constitutes a good education? What makes a family, a culture, a nation? How does the individual fit into these gathering units? What is the trajectory of a marriage? What are the limits of change? How is the dignity of a human being colored one way or another? Searching for Robyn Scott's views on these basic questions kept me reading. Clearly, this is more than an exotic memoir of a faraway country and people having nothing to do with the rest of us except to entertain.

It is with a sense of homecoming that I enter Robyn Scott's Twenty Chicken world. Her family is one of a maverick breed of outlanders that has loved this country and contributed to Botswana's peaceful and harmonious development.

Seven-year-old Robyn came to Botswana in 1988, about 11 years after I returned to the United States. She was homeschooled by her mother until 1995, when her formal education began. A successful adult, she appears to have suffered in no way from her early fluid education of learning by doing, by observing, and by being read to.

Graceful asides define Botswana's history, culture, and challenges, including the AIDS crisis, which is told in frank language. Written mostly from the point of view of a child, this is a coming-of-age story of the best kind. As Robyn matures, she takes us through Botswana's changing fortunes in the Selebi-Phikwe area of the Limpopo River and later on a game farm closer to South Africa. This is an environment that both embraces her and allows her to grow up on her own terms.

Twenty Chickens is particularly good at describing Botswana's plant life and wildlife and the freedom of the bush land. The narrative is complemented by photos, a rough map, endearingly drawn icons, and glossaries of Setswana and Afrikaans. An index would make the book even more accessible.

One of my favorite sections is Chapter 16, The Whole Family's Half of an Island. Here, more than in other chapters, we are given a direct sense of Botswana culture and relationships and the heartfelt hospitality lavished upon extended family, even if part of that family is white. There is playfulness and ingenuity here, and a demonstration of natural Batswana diplomacy which is wonderfully revealing of this quiet people living in a vast land.

by Janet Grace Riehl
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women