My expectations were high for Follow Me To Africa. As a budding paleoanthropologist in my youth and a lover of the Serengeti, I looked forward to discovering more about Mary Leakey’s work as a paleoanthropologist. However, this fictional biography failed to live up to my expectations.
This is a dual timeline novel. One follows Mary’s life from the 1930s through the 1983 when she leaves the Olduvai Gorge and the Great Rift Valley for good. The second timeline follows Grace Clark, a fictional seventeen-year-old girl and encompasses only a few weeks in 1983. After her mother’s death, Grace visits Africa with her estranged father. Though Mary initially didn’t want the girl in the camp, they do develop a relationship when they work together to save a cheetah named Lisa.
I wasn’t completely drawn into the story. Many words are devoted to the rather prosaic story of Mary’s love affair and eventual marriage to the older Louis B. Leakey, a famous paleoanthropologist himself, words that could have been used to develop Mary’s character and more deeply explore her groundbreaking work. The prose is rather straightforward and simplistic, and the vocabulary seemed more in tune with a young adult novel. I would have liked something a bit more sophisticated. The author does a decent job of capturing the landscape of the Olduvai Gorge and Ngorongoro Crater.
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Follow Me to Africa (Sourcebooks Landmark, February 25, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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