BONUS Book Review: Looking for Evelyn by Maggie Ritchie
Published by Saraband
I went into this book knowing nothing about it. I only knew that Looking for Evelyn by Maggie Ritchie was published the day that I found it. I didn’t even know what genre it was.
The story opens with a journalist just shy of 30, Chrissie Docherty, returning to Zambia, where she was raised before her parents moved back to Scotland. She finds a few familiar faces, though needs to find Evelyn Fielding, so that the blanks in her memory can be filled in. I was intrigued to say the least at the premise of this story: a successful woman in her career seeking answers of her past in an area wrought with racism. Given the title of the book, I thought it would be about tracking Evelyn down while she came to terms with her own past—something that has to do with processing and developing personal understanding (my favorite!).
But I was disheartened when she did manage to find Evelyn by the third, short chapter, and that they enjoyed spending several days together. The bulk of the book, in fact, goes back in time, to the ‘70’s, each one sharing their side of the time frame. This, in my mind, is where it goes wrong. When both characters are introduced near the beginning of the book in the ‘90’s, they are both strong, independent women who made their way through the world. Evelyn is found to own her own safari destination, which she seems to run on her own. However, when it transitions to twenty years earlier, she is naive, at best, and somewhat of a stereo type. She gets whisked away from her life in London for the idea of adventure in Africa with her brand new husband, who she calls “darling”, likes children, and seems to get swept away with any man that crosses her path. The two versions of Evelyn don’t seem to match at all. The older one somewhat exudes confidence while the younger one hungers for any attention she can get.
The setting of the story, is during the time when Zambia has somewhat gained their independence, and while there are still English settlers there, racism is still strongly at play. This is the redeeming aspect of the book, is its wanting to portray the South of Africa during this time, something that I, myself, knew little of.
The book as a whole is something that I call a Lifetime book, that is, a story that the Lifetime Channel in the U.S. would pick up and make a straight-to-television movie of. It is a story perhaps meant for a feminine audience who might yearn to escape the normal days of a standard family structure. There is nothing wrong with this, in any way. This just isn’t a piece of literature that needs to be cracked open to see into its depths and analyzed. It simply isn’t my genre.
However, I will say that for the most part, it is well written. The imagery is vivid, and it’s easy to get doused in the sticky heat of the setting. The colors are what struck me the most: the references to the contrast of the red land and the blue sky were picturesque. I feel that Richie had the idea that she wanted to write about Africa, write about a time period, but struggled to make a plot that fit into it. The characters were somewhat two-dimensional, overall, and the plot somewhat lofty.
Yet, because of the beauty of her pros, I wouldn’t dismiss any of her other works based off this particular novel. I can resign to say that it’s simply not my cup of tea.
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