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I picked this book up in my local library largely because there seemed to be a whole bunch of books by the same author, so if it turned out to be good then there would be a lot of new books for me to read. This sadly did not work out.
This is not because it is a bad book. It is because it is a book that appears to be written for young children. The plot, the characterisation, the language, everything seems to be aimed at readers of between 8 and 14 years of age. However, then there is some totally gratuitous sex stuck in the last couple of pages to make it less suitable for the kiddies. I have no idea why.
And they aren't even good sex scenes. It is as though someone else read it and told the author that it seemed like a childrens book and so she stuck in a couple of sex scenes after the story had actually finished to try to make it more "adult". As though that's what distinguishes adult literature.
The sex was totally out of place, as up until that point it had been an old fashioned "girls own adventure" story about a plucky English lass in Africa to find her lost daddy. We can tell it's not really for adults as the woman acts like a 12 year old, rather than the 27 year old oil prospector she is meant to be.
She doesn't know what a bar girl is (despite having lived and worked in oil fields all over the world). She meets a cute guy and pictures him in swimming trunks! Even a real 12 year old is unlikely to be that prim.
What sprung to my mind is that it was like Enid Blyton had written an African adventure tale. The Famous Five and the Mystery of the Lost Geologist.
Not that there is anything wrong with childrens books that have everyone behaving decently. That is the sort of thing children should read. But the last minute addition of a couple of sex scenes (including one on the banks of a lake where a man eating crocodile had just come out of the water to eat someone) ruins it for that purpose.
I was also annoyed by the "noble savage" idealisation of life in Africa. It was often explicitly stated that the African way of life is much better and happier than the foolish, overworked, unfriendly Europeans. Which begs the question of why it is Africans who risk their lives to smuggle themselves into Western countries, rather than the other way around. But that is a question of politics and logic rather than a criticism of the actual writing itself.
Still there must be an audience for books like that, going on the large number of them that I saw on the shelves. But I won't be one of them.
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