The Girl Who Married an Eagle

March 25, 2013
Flashes of talent are evident in Myers’s uneven fourth and final Belgian Congo mystery (after 2012’s The Boy Who Stole the Leopard’s Spots). The main action opens with the winning line, “Julia Elaine Newton was young and naïve, but she was not altogether stupid”; the novel then goes on to recount Julia’s experiences as a missionary whom the locals dub “She Whose Name One Can’t Be Bothered to Remember.” And every so often, Myers comes up with a memorable way of describing the land where she was born and spent her early years (e.g., “Travel in the Belgian Congo was like pulling the handle on a slot machine—one that was rigged so that it never came up with three matching numbers”). But those looking for a mystery storyline are likely to be disappointed. Julia’s confrontations with a chief intent on getting his wife back will strike many as stagy rather than dramatic. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary Agency.

March 1, 2013
An artful combination of cultural anthropology and fiction. The eagle of the title refers to a chief of the Bashilele tribe who reside in the Kasai district of the Belgian Congo. The novel interweaves the stories of two young women: Julia, a white girl from the Bible Belt of the United States who wishes to do missionary work in Africa, and Buakane, who longs to escape her fate. Buakane is traded for goats and chickens by her parents to the chief, who is looking for his 23rd wife, a position that ensures she will have food and shelter until her powerful and abusive husband dies, at which time she will be buried alive alongside him. The women's paths cross when Buakane runs away from her wedding and is rescued from a hyena attack by missionaries driving Julia to her new post. As the story progresses, readers are invited to contemplate religious philosophy and consider the exploitation of women. Engrossing and educational.

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May 1, 2013

Don't miss the finale (and fourth entry) to this haunting and inspirational story out of 1950s Congo (after The Boy Who Stole the Leopard's Spots), partially derived from Myers's own background as a child of missionaries.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2013
No blood is shed, except in a thwarted hyena attack, in the final book in Myers' Belgian Congo series, although the possibility of life-threatening danger is ever present. In the months before the Congo gains its independence from Belgium in 1959, young Buakane is pledged to become the twenty-third wife of powerful Chief Eagle, nearly three decades her senior. But the girl, frightened especially by the prospect of being buried alive, as custom dictates, when her husband dies, flees before the ceremony and is rescued by American missionaries who run a boarding school for such runaway child brides. Here Julia Newton, fresh from college in Ohio, finds that both her kind heart and fresh tongue cause problems, distressing particularly the crusty missionary nurse. Former series protagonist Amanda Brown is absent, visiting her Belgian police officer husband across the river, but she's unlikely to be missed in this romp reminiscent of the novels of Alexander McCall Smith and based on Myers' own childhood experiences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)