When Sylvia Brownrigg received a package addressed to her father that had been lost for over fifty years, she wanted to deliver it to him before it was too late. She did not expect that her father, Nick, would choose not to open it. A few years later, she and her brother finally did.
An exuberant yarn ... Brownrigg is by background a novelist, and some way into the book, she veers from memoir into fiction. This is a risky move. But, while the fictionalization of her grandfather’s experience in 1930s Kenya feels a bit cursory and labored, Brownrigg’s childhood adventures at her dad’s ranch practically leap off the page ... What I love about this memoir is how ably it gets at something very complicated indeed: the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die.
Engaging but choppy ... Brownrigg relates the above in sturdy nonfiction chapters. But confronted with things she’ll never know, she turns to fiction. To a degree, this makes sense — she has published several novels — and the results are sometimes wonderful ... Other fictional chapters aren’t so effective ... Chapters like this suggest that over the years, Brownrigg approached this project from different angles but struggled to find a unifying narrative voice. The fictional chapters are all beautifully written. But some... feel unessential, detracting from an otherwise absorbing book.
Ms. Brownrigg hasn’t restricted herself to writing a straight memoir, or even a straight work of fiction. To tell her story she has audaciously incorporated elements of both, using imagined scenes as a way to reveal emotional truths. But throughout she’s prone to off-the-point, exhausting digressions that give the reader a bit too much to wade through.
