About this ebook
A stubborn, precocious young girl is caught in the front line of the clash of cultures, as her remote tribe confronts new modern possibilities.
In 1970s Kenya, modernity's edge has finally made it up the hills to the Samburu tribe's secluded highland home. As her family reckons with new challenges to their ancient ways, young Monique chases belonging and her dreams. She sees her path ahead: towards independence, and away from being sold in young marriage. But with danger all around, it will take all of her grit, allies, and luck to stay on her chosen path, and to survive.
Real-life stories of a remarkable childhood, filled with humor, beauty, calamity, and strength: featuring pre-electricity traditional village life, outlaws and bandits, magnificent wildlife, a crazy cow, a traditional healer grandfather, rescues and escapes, mean “Granny Ears” and her rhino-hide belt, Catholic boarding school, and much more.
Recommended reader age 14+, due to some mature themes and some cursing.
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About the author
Monique has led one of the world's most interesting lives. She went from manyatta life to enterprising in Nairobi, traveling Europe and Israel alone, moving to America for study and marriage, fleeing Hurricane Katrina with her kids, and ultimately whisking her children to the furthest corner of America she could find: the tip of the Pacific Northwest. Here she now keeps her elegant, multilingual Samburu self, cosmopolitan and yet very down-to-earth, in a gleaming small city among huge lakes and soggy, chilly evergreen forests. Utterly out of place, but utterly at home.
In addition to working with Monique Leparleen on the Daughter of the Leopard project, Ann is also an ESL, reading, writing, and critical thinking teacher. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, and previously taught at the National University of Singapore and in her own private classroom in Seremban, Malaysia. Daughter of the Leopard was written over 12+ years while on a long sabbatical from teaching in order to raise her children and write. She is currently working on the sequel for Daughter of the Leopard, as well as children's adaptations.
