Brown (Odd Boy Out
) brings to life a bold and enchanting girl, the young Beryl Markham. Excerpted from West with the Night
, the 1942 autobiography the aviator wrote about her youth in East Africa, the text relates the events of a visit she made with her father to the Elkington Farm, where Paddy, a hand-raised lion, freely roams the estate. "A tame lion in an unnatural lion,'' Markham's father warns her, "and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy." Brown's sepia-tinted watercolors impart information without drawing attention to themselves. He portrays the narrator with a long brown ponytail and gray trousers. She calls the lion "harmless"; still she "remember[s] not to run," walking slowly past the giant cat when she finds him in her path. A sequence of seven suspenseful pages—one per second of elapsed time, seemingly—shows that Markham's father is right. "There was no sound or wind. Even the lion made no sound as he came swiftly behind me. What followed was my scream that was barely a whisper." During the few moments the lion actually traps her, Brown's golden spreads turn to cold shadows of purple and blue; then, as help quickly arrives, the pictures turn sunny again. "Paddy had lived and died in ways not of his choosing," Markham concludes, with unexpected compassion. Her reverence for the majesty of Nature—even its predatory creatures—will not be lost on young readers. Ages 6-10. (Sept.)
