Sign-In
Cart
Daughter of the Leopard: True Stories From a Samburu Maasai Girlhood (Large Print Edition)
Paperback
Series: Daughter of the Leopard, Book 1
Biographies GeneralHistorical Figures
Publisher: Swallow and Quill Literary
Published: Feb 25 2025
Pages: 446
Weight: 1.69
Height: 0.90 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
*Large print edition*
A stubborn, precocious young girl is caught in the front line of the clash of cultures, as her remote tribe confronts new modern possibilities.
In 1970s Kenya, modernity's edge has finally made it up the hills to the Samburu tribe's secluded highland home. As her family reckons with new challenges to their ancient ways, young Monique chases belonging and her dreams. She sees her path ahead: towards independence, and away from being sold in young marriage. But with danger all around, it will take all of her grit, allies, and luck to stay on her chosen path, and to survive.
Real-life stories of a remarkable childhood, filled with humor, beauty, calamity, and strength: featuring pre-electricity traditional village life, outlaws and bandits, magnificent wildlife, a crazy cow, a traditional healer grandfather, rescues and escapes, mean Granny Ears and her rhino-hide belt, Catholic boarding school, and much more.
Ages 14+: some mature themes, some cursing
. . . .
The Samburu, a group of the Maasai, live in Kenya's cool northwest highlands, near the Great Rift Valley. They take much pride in their traditions and ancient culture, which is rich in heritage and skill for surviving via the Old Ways. For centuries they have been quasi-nomadic pastoralists: herdsfolk who move around when it's useful to help their animals, traditionally cattle, thrive.
Monique's childhood was at a unique cultural transition point, but the issues she struggled with still challenge many families. This is especially so for the most remote and poorest, and for women and girls, who often still face enormous misogyny, abuse, FGM, and forced marriage. Traditional society is rigidly organized, and strictly controls women and girls, seeing them as mainly supports-or commodities-for men, and for raising children and doing most of the village labor. Samburu girls have often faced great difficulty if, like Monique, they aspire to a different path.
Modernity and climate change have placed additional strain on the already-difficult highland pastoralist life, causing rapid change. The ancient village-based cattle-keeping ways and the traditional medicine practiced by Monique's grandfather, for instance, may not last much longer. Her stories are also a useful record of some of those rapidly-vanishing ways, seen through her eyes; and a record of what it was like to live-as a girl-at the point when the hammer hit the anvil: when great change came for a culture that had long been seen as, and indeed regarded itself as, unchangeable.
Her stories also raise several big questions:
- Do we have to follow what our culture has planned for us, just because it has long been upheld as excellent?
- What do we do when the multiple aspects of our identities-ethnic/tribal, national, religious, gender, human-place conflicting demands on us and our rights and desires?
- How do children who face great difficulty and lack of support survive? How much can they thrive without that full support?
- How do you face intolerable control, hostility, and prejudice and escape to build your own life?
Names have been changed for privacy and dialogue and scenes reconstructed, but the story is told within the limits of standard memoir and creative nonfiction practice.
2 different editions
Also available
Daughter of the Leopard: True Stories From a Samburu Maasai Girlhood
Leparleen, Monique N.
Hendricks, Ann
Paperback
Daughter of the Leopard: True Stories From a Samburu Maasai Girlhood
Hendricks, Ann
Leparleen, Monique N.
Hardcover
Also from
Leparleen, Monique N.
Daughter of the Leopard: True Stories From a Samburu Maasai Girlhood
Leparleen, Monique N.
Hendricks, Ann
Paperback
Daughter of the Leopard: True Stories From a Samburu Maasai Girlhood
Hendricks, Ann
Leparleen, Monique N.
Hardcover
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII
Warnicke, Retha M.
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
Gift of Power: The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man
Lame Deer, Chief Archie Fire
Erdoes, Richard
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover
Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom from Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans
Jones, Sheinelle
Hardcover