Rules of the Wild

Francesca Marciano

There is something about reading of Africa that pulls at me, as if a connection I've not yet identified opens the door and invites me in. I often think I could easily go to Africa and become lost in its mystery and fall hard for its seduction. When I read "Out of Africa", I cried when Karen Blixen left Africa for the final time. I knew her pain of leaving a place which would forever dance in your heart and never stop calling you back.

Rules of the Wild by Marciano is many things, but it's not Out of Africa. There is no Karen Blixen here to show the way of sunrises and sunsets. But your narrator, Esme, short for Esmeralda, does give you several love stories within this novel. Each of them destructive and yet beautiful in its own way. Esme seems to be a woman who seeks that which will destroy her, eat her up and leave her shallow. Including Africa, for all her love for this land, and at times she startles you with passages of what she see's when she looks through the skies, or sits on a ledge with the whole world beneath her. But at the same time, she acknowledges that Africa can be like some wild beast waiting in the shadows, changing you and draining you while it fills you up. That is only one of the love stories here, the other two are the men she chooses to evolve around, both so different in the ways in which they love her in return, and she, so complex in the way in which she loves each of them. There is an overall desperation to this novel and at times you tire of the road you see laid out before you. Marciano seems to be telling more of a memoir between these pages than a novel and I often wondered if that was not what I was reading. But the characters and the setting and the story creation was enough to keep me interested to the end, never really certain where Esme would go. I don't know that it would make a top ten list, but it's a good book to curl up with for a few days.