The Camel Bookmobile - by Masha Hamilton (Paperback)

About the Book

Fiona Sweeney's family is astonished when she travels to Africa to help start a traveling library. Seamless and haunting, this powerful saga captures the riddles and calamities that can occur when two cultures collide.

From the Back Cover

Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.

But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.

Review Quotes

"Inspired by real events, this captivating story about a determined chick with a big heart will touch you deeply." - Cosmopolitan
"Masha Hamilton's portrayal of nomadic culture is lovingly and colorfully told" - USA Today
Hamilton presents a rare and balanced perspective . . . using rich and evocative prose . . . Highly recommended. - Library Journal
"a poignant, ennobling, and buoyant tale of risks and rewards, surrender and sacrifice" - Booklist (starred review)
"The Camel Bookmobile vibrates with the life and landscape of Africa, and Hamilton shines when presenting the foreign, and often brutal, traditions of Mididima. She neither condones nor condemns, but profiles daily existence with clear, sparkling prose and a well-executed plot peopled with characters readers can't help but care about deeply. The author's background as a journalist and world-traveler is evident, and her experience combined with her impeccable research into the real-life Kenyan Camel Mobile Library program makes for an enlightening new novel." - BookPage
"captivating" - Entertainment Weekly
"The Camel Bookmobile vibrates with the life and landscape of Africa" - BookPage
Masha Hamilton's magical new novel transported me across the globe, teaching me about faith, ambition, and the surprise of love. Fi is character to fall for and cheer for. Her interactions with the Mididima are spellbinding and broke my heart. - Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How to be Lost and Forgive Me
"In this vivid, absorbing novel Masha Hamilton transports her readers, even more surely than the camels do books, to the village of Mididima and the struggle between traditional values and western education. Richly peopled, full of conflicts and surprises, The Camel Bookmobile made me think and feel in all the best ways. My only regret was that the book had to end." - Margot Livesey
"I've always known that books can change lives. Masha Hamilton has opened my eyes to how books can also change entire communities, and not always in the ways one might expect. The Bookmobile is a brave and astonishing novel; it transported me to a world I hadn't known, and my life is all the richer for it." - Gayle Brandeis, author of Self Storage and The Book of Dead Birds, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change.
"Hamilton's captivating third novel...weaves memorable characters and elemental emotions in artful prose." - Publishers Weekly