Adrienne Benson's "The Brightest Sun"

If your reader's imagination has ever soared to Africa, the world's second largest continent, then imagine no more. Debut novelist Adrienne Benson, (https://adriennebenson.com/) informed by her girlhood when she was the precocious child of USAID workers, takes us there in a visceral way in this enchanting tale of mothers and their daughters as they struggle to define themselves in a world both alien and welcoming.

Leona's anthropological work with the Maasai tribes in Kenya is a way to distance herself from America, from an abusive father and a mother too busy to see what was happening under her own roof. So when Leona becomes pregnant from a one-night stand she worries that she too, will be an unworthy mother. She participates in a ritual that will proffer care of her daughter Adia to Simi, a childless Maasai woman and friend who faces the humiliation of expulsion from her husband's care if she doesn't have a baby to care for.

A biologist, Jane arrives in Nairobi under the auspices of the Elephant Foundation, an NGO that tracks and details the slaughtering of elephants for the valuable tusks. Like Leona she's fleeing an untenable family situation back in the states. Jane and her Kikuyu guide Muthega venture out to the Rift Valley before dawn each day following the glorious animals, taking DNA and dung samples, hoping to use scientific information to stop the illegal poaching. But an act of violence sends Jane in emotional tatters to the U.S. embassy where she meets Paul and subsumes her life and passions into his.

Through the lives of these two women, Benson has us crisscrossing the continent, from the green hills of Kenya to the seething heat and humidity of Liberia and north to the dry desert air of Morocco, then back to Nairobi where Adia and Jane's daughter Grace meet at school and become inseparable.

This is a deeply moving novel about complicated people whose paths in life intersect in unsuspected ways, women and men who allow their grim pasts to trample on their bright futures. As joys emanate from past sorrows each character opens to the possibility of, if not pure happiness, radiant contentment. The character of Adia is especially wonderful as she skillfully balances her life with the Maasai with her life among her actual blood relatives.

Though she says in the novel's acknowledgement that she is no Karen Blixen, I couldn't help but feel Blixen's presence in Benson's loving portrayal of Simi and the Maasai women, warriors all, and of the visual, almost painterly descriptions of the many faces of Africa. This book came out last month from Park Row Books. Check your library. You'll be glad you did.