Auma's Long Run, by Eucabeth Odhiambo

Eucabeth Odhiambo grew up in Kenya.  While she now lives in Pennsylvania, where she teaches in the teacher education department of Shippensburg University, she returns to her home country in her debut novel, Auma's Long Run.  Auma is a teenager in rural Kenya whose village is being ravaged by AIDS.  She is torn between her responsibility to her family and her desire to become a doctor.

In many ways, Auma is just like girls anywhere in the world.  But her lifestyle is foreign to most Western readers.  She has to walk to the stream to fetch water, she lives in a mud house with no electricity or indoor plumbing, and has cows in the yard.  Her father works in Nairobi and sends money home to the family.  Everything changes when he arrives home earlier than expected.  Soon both he and Auma's mother have died of AIDS.

Auma loves to run and has become a local star, winning most of her races.  She wants to earn a scholarship for her running so she can study to become a doctor.  With her parents' sickness, her mother's efforts to marry her off, and her responsibilities caring for her younger siblings, it starts looking like she won't get to follow her dreams.

Auma's Long Run is a touching story that brings the realities of poverty and sickness in rural Kenya into focus, personalizing village life in a way that statistics and new items can't.  The target audience may be young girls, but boys and adults will be enriched and will enjoy this story of Auma's coming of age in Africa.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!