OLIVE THE LIONHEART

Intriguing tale of a young Scottish woman who traveled to Africa to find her lost fiance.

Cleveland-based author Ricca clearly relishes the discovery of strange, off-the-beaten-path stories. While researching Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, he managed to secure the heretofore undisclosed diaries of Olive MacLeod (1880-1936), a Scottish aristocrat who was distraught when she learned that her fiance, naturalist and adventurer Boyd Alexander, had disappeared in West Africa in 1910. Letting his subject “tell [the story] herself” while avoiding the temptation to “reach in from the future and fix things,” the author engagingly re-creates her relationship with Alexander and determination to find him when he went missing. MacLeod met the dashing explorer on an outing in Kent in the summer of 1908; she was much taken by his stories of danger and intrigue, and he was fascinated by her quick mind and liveliness. Alexander had lost his brother on a previous expedition, and he sought to return to Africa for “unfinished business.” Before he left in December, he remarked, “once one is a marked man one is not allowed to stop….I don’t suppose I shall get any rest till I leave my bones in Africa.” Through their correspondence, interspersed throughout, we learn that she first declined to marry him and then changed her mind. In a sometimes elliptical narrative, Ricca tracks MacLeod’s African trek in the company of the Talbots, friends and fellow traveling companions of Alexander’s whom the author also fleshes out. They ventured through Nigeria, Chad, and elsewhere, meeting native tribes, facing dangerous wildlife; eventually, they arrived in Maifoni, where MacLeod learned the sad truth about her fiance. Some readers may become slightly disoriented by the abrupt switches in time, but the author successfully conveys the powerful, nearly hallucinatory state of grief that MacLeod must have endured over the course of her journey.

A swift-moving re-creation of an intrepid, rare spirit of her age.