Top image: the rural Kenyan night sky, similar to how Monique experienced it. Image credit: Amirreza Kamkar, licensed under CC BY 4.0
.jpg){kind=link}
Granny Ears could hear fun happening from any side of the huge village. She even seemed to be able to hear quiet leisure, and would come from afar bearing down like a lashing thunderclap on the hapless resting youth. -Chapter 5
Monique N. Leparleen was born to her clan’s first educated man, PK Leparleen, who became regionally famous for his thriving businesses, generous philanthropy, and eventual high government positions. She was born at a time when modernity was just creeping up the hills towards the Samburu’s ancient ways, and she had to fight relentlessly to pursue her education and escape her tribe’s unsavory plans for her, including early forced marriage. She has led an incredibly interesting life, from early childhood onward, including stories featuring:
- rural, pre-electricity life in her grandmother’s traditional manyatta (village) and her father’s farm
- awe-inspiring nature
- a bizarre cow and “spawn of Satan” ram
- endless water-fetching, dung clearing, and egg washing
- close sisters
- evading getting whooped by her mean village-head granny’s rhino-hide belt
- a dear traditional-healer grandfather
- Catholic school drama
- shepherding with her beloved Jimmy, the “Afro-German shepherd”
- facing off the local outlaw/rapist alone with her dog
- Sudanese raiders
- running away from forced marriage to a stranger: that she was not even aware was happening!
- escaping several attempts on her life, including from family
- an up-close encounter with a leopard
- being “adopted” by a demanding and persnickety old elephant
- outsmarting her dad to get her diploma against his wishes
- … and much more
She survived through it all with humor, determination, a bit of luck, care and help from those around her when it mattered most, and faith.
Poop was almost never thrown. -chapter 6
About the books themselves
Ann initially envisioned this project as a tribal Kenyan parallel to Laura Ingalls-Wilder’s Little House books, which Monique’s stories reminded her of. As we kept working, however, it quickly became apparent that the full story was too mature for young audiences, and too jam-packed with adventure, beauty, humor, calamity, and triumph to fit in one adult/young adult memoir and still be digestible. Monique’s life was so intense that many of her simple “plot points” could be whole climaxes in other books!
We both love to read. We especially love books that are wonderfully digestible: paced thoughtfully with pathos and humor/beauty, emergency and restoration/relaxation, to not emotionally exhaust the reader. We also prefer our books with fairly short chapters and true-to-memory/reality scenes and dialogue: and NOT INCREDIBLY LONG. We hate reader’s indigestion! We’d both much rather read a well-paced series than one jammed-up huge book.
“Did God banish Satan to our kitchen?” Monique wondered. “Is he our cook? How can all this food be so terrible?” (She later discovered it was not the Prince of Darkness cooking their meals, but the overworked matrons, who also had to boil and bleach and hang dozens of bedsheets in addition to cooking and their other duties.) -Chapter 13
And so Monique’s full story, which for the sake of integrity we wanted told first before any idealized and sanitized children’s adaptations, is being written in two fairly short memoirs/autofiction novels. The first, tentatively titled DAUGHTER OF THE LEOPARD: True Stories from a Samburu Maasai Girlhood, features Monique’s young girlhood up to age nine and is complete at 70,000 words including glossary and end material. We are in the querying process to find an appropriate agent or publisher.
The sequel, from age nine through her late teen years, tentatively DAUGHTER OF THE LEOPARD: True Stories from a Samburu Maasai Youth, is well underway and with luck is hoped to be complete by early 2025.
Both novels are recommended for ages 14+, for mature content. We also are keen to get the children’s adaptations out, to add to the wonderful developing richness and diversity of children’s literature. Ann hopes the first of these may be ready by late 2025.
Our blog and mailing list are both great ways to check on progress. Ann will update progress in the blog, and the mailing list will announce when a book in the project has come out.
But even if people intended to have nothing to do with the stinky, huge, frog-eyed spawn of Satan ram, he definitely had his own designs upon them. -Chapter 18