DESIRE

Quirky but appealing debut about a young woman who returns to her childhood home in Africa to set some family ghosts to rest.

Anthropologist Elena Monroe is having some trouble finding herself. She grew up in Africa, where her stepfather researched polio and smallpox vaccines while her mother photographed elephants for conservation groups. Now she lives in New Mexico and tells everyone her mother died in 1975. But her boyfriend Michael, who lost his parents as a teenager and thinks they have that in common, one day meets Elena’s mother leaning on her car in Albuquerque. Why did Elena lie to him? Good question, especially after Elena packs up and leaves for Kenya the next day to visit her mother’s grave. In 1975, when Elena was only nine, East Africa was in the throes of an ivory craze, as skyrocketing prices combined with conservation laws to fuel a thriving black market in elephant tusks. Elena’s mother set out to document the poaching cartels that rampaged through the bush in search of big profits from illegal safaris, and she soon found herself in the middle of a mob war of sorts, in which the legal boundaries separating the mobsters from the militias from the cabinet ministers were all but erased. We know that the young Elena saw someone killed during an elephant shoot; we also know that someone is buried beneath her mother’s tombstone. It will take some doing to disentangle the rest of the facts from this intentionally snarled narrative, but that doesn’t dampen the fire here. Maybe after Elena sorts it all out she can come home and get on with her life—if she’s lucky.

Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times, and her evocation of Kenya is impressionistic and moving without being manipulative or touristy.