Listening for lions [sound recording] / by Gloria Whelan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Thirteen-year-old Rachel Sheridan is left an orphan after influenza takes the lives of her missionary parents in British East Africa in 1919. When cruel neighbors take her in, Rachel suspects their intentions may not be honest. Soon, Rachel becomes entangled in a shocking and nefarious plot that takes her away from her beloved East Africa on a lonely and treacherous journey across the ocean. Surrounded by greed and lies, Rachel must rely on her irrepressible spirit and extraordinary wit to weather her incredible adventure. And somewhere along the way, between deception and hope, the truth sets Rachel free and Africa calls her home. National Book Award-winning author Gloria Whelan crafts a wickedly delicious story of treachery and triumph, in which one young woman must claim her true identity in order to forge her own future and transform herself from victim to heroine.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Listening for Lions MSR Chapter One It crept up on us like the hyenas I heard at night from my window, drawn to us, Kanoro said, by the smell of death. It was 1919, and because the Great War was over, we had thought all the deaths were at an end, but it wasn't so. All over the world the cruel influenza had been taking lives. In America half a million people died; in India, many, many millions. In British East Africa, where I was living, the influenza began in the seaport of Mombasa, traveled three hundred miles to the city of Nairobi, and from there crept onto the farms and plantations and into the Kikuyu and Masai shambas. At last it reached Tumaini, the mission hospital where my father was a doctor and my mother a teacher. The influenza killed my parents. My parents had been sent from England as missionaries to the Kikuyu and the Masai. There had been a minister at our mission, but he had left to serve in the war. Father had tried to carry on with the church work, but he was often too busy with the hospital. He said, "When a man lies with his leg sliced open and the bone sticking out, there is no time for preaching." My parents had been in Africa for fourteen years. I was born the year after they arrived. Africa was the only home I knew. I could not imagine living anywhere else. The beds in our hospital were filled with Africans and the wards and hallways crowded with their families. Father treated sleeping sickness, plague, smallpox, and leprosy. He helped mothers whose babies had a hard time being born. One miracle especially filled me with joy. I watched as blind people were led to the hospital. When Father removed their cataracts, they walked home on their own. I would close my eyes and imagine I could not see. After a minute of darkness I would open my eyes to the sun and all the bright colors that were Africa. Later, when I had to live in England's bleak winters, I wished for my own miracle to give me back Africa's brightness. The families of the patients who came to our hospital camped out on the grounds of the hospital, for they would not leave the care of a family member to a stranger. All day long you could hear the Kikuyu chattering to one another and smell the smoke of their fires as they roasted a goat or cooked their maize porridge, posho. The men of the Masai wore togalike cloths draped over their shoulders and carried spears. The men of the Kikuyu wore blankets or sometimes nothing at all. The Kikuyu women were clothed in leather aprons or hundreds of strings of bright beads. When the Kikuyu came to work at the hospital as nurses and assistants, the men wore khaki shorts and shirts and the women plain white dresses and caps. They were like birds who had shed their rich plumage. Father had begged the mission board in England for another doctor and a nurse, but the war had taken all the doctors and nurses, so Father trained the Kikuyu to assist him. One of the men, Ita, was already performing minor surgery, and one of the nurses, Wanja, was the anesthetist. The Masai would not be trained and seldom came to our church. The Kikuyu first came out of respect for Father, but soon they were enjoying the singing and many eagerly took up the new faith. Mother had taught me to play hymns on the piano, and the Kikuyu would call out their favorites and I would turn the pages of the hymnal to their choices, until after a while I knew them all by heart and could play as loudly as they could sing. We were only a small hospital. There was a large hospital in Nairobi for white people and another for the native Africans, but the city was a long drive over bad roads. When I went into Nairobi with my parents to McKinnon's store, it was by oxcart. My favorite place in Nairobi was the Indian bazaar, with its wonderful smells and its counters heaped with spices. My parents didn't mix with the wealthy English planters and would not have been welcome in their cricket and tennis clubs. "With their drinking and foolery," my father said, "they are like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. They are headed for destruction." On the very few occasions I had been allowed to accompany Mother and Father to Nairobi, the planters we saw going about on the streets appeared well behaved. I supposed the middle of the day was not the time for drinking and foolery. One of the farmers I disliked, a Mr. Pritchard, had a sisal plantation near our hospital. Occasionally he sent over one of the natives on his plantation who had taken ill, but he would never inquire as to how the man was doing. Once a Kikuyu who worked for him had been brought to the hospital by the other workers because he had been beaten by Mr. Pritchard. He was covered with blood, and his ribs were broken. It was the only time I heard Father use a curse word. Mother and Father did not gossip, but on that evening Father spoke again of drinking and foolery. I heard him say, "Pritchard is sure to gamble away that farm in one of his drinking bouts." During the war many of the Kikuyu had been drafted by the British to serve as porters in the British army. British soldiers had fought the Germans in nearby German East Africa. After the war the Kikuyu came back with nothing but bits of their worn uniforms, but they had seen a world beyond the native reserves. They no longer wanted anything to do with men like Mr. Pritchard, but they had to pay hut taxes to the British government, and the only way the Kikuyu could get the money for the taxes was to work for the planters. Listening for Lions MSR . Copyright © by Gloria Whelan . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Listening for Lions by Gloria Whelan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Whelan (Homeless Bird) places her courageous and thoughtful narrator in Africa in 1919, just after the Great War and manages to place a new twist on familiar themes. "It didn't occur to me at that moment that I, too, might become an orphan. I think I believed that because Father was a doctor, he would let no illness come to our family." When 13 year-old Rachel Sheridan loses her British missionary parents, unscrupulous neighbors exploit her resemblance to their deceased daughter, Valerie, and send her to England to try to collect the inheritance from Valerie's ailing grandfather. What sets this familiar tale apart is Rachel's love of the African land, animals and Masai people, and the details that make Whelan's narrative come alive. The author ensures that Rachel's lack of choices and her sensitive nature make her complicity wholly believable. Once in England, the girl's evolving relationship with the invalid grandfather heightens her sense of guilt about her assumed identity. However, when the villains are exposed, much of the novel's tension dissipates and the balance of the book reads somewhat like an extended epilogue. Still, Whelan's formidable and appealing heroine will keep readers rooting for her dream of a home with the lions of Africa. Ages 10-up. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 4-8-Orphaned by the influenza epidemic in British East Africa in 1919, 13-year-old Rachel is sent by conniving neighbors to visit an elderly man in England, passing as their daughter-his granddaughter-to pave the way for their return and the inheritance of his estate. The daughter of a missionary doctor and his wife, Rachel has grown up connected to the African countryside and people. Terrified that to reveal her secret would hasten Grandfather Pritchard's death, and fearing life in an orphanage, she goes along with her new identity as Valerie Pritchard. But she cannot help but get involved with his love for the birds on his land, and she entertains him with stories about what is happening outside his sickroom and what kinds of things her "friend Rachel" saw in their African world. In the tradition of Frances Hodgson Burnett, this is a satisfying story of an intelligent but unassuming girl who wins the heart of an elderly man who is not such a fool as his wastrel son might think. Woven throughout are descriptions of the natural world and the people of what is now Kenya, as well as the surroundings of an early-20th-century English estate. Rachel's love for her rural African world is convincing, and readers will be gratified by the way she contrives to return and continue her parents' work. An old-fashioned and enjoyable read.-Kathleen Isaacs, Towson University, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Gr. 6-9. In 1919, in British East Africa, 13-year-old Rachel loses her missionary parents during an influenza epidemic. When she turns to her English neighbors for help, the Pritchards ensnare her in a shocking, ill-intentioned scheme. Disowned by their rich family, they had planned to send their daughter, Valerie, to her grandfather's estate in England, where they hoped she would help to reinstate them in his will. But after Valerie dies of flu, the Pritchards conspire to send Rachel, whose red hair matches their daughter's. Whelan creates deliciously odious villains in the Pritchard parents, who, with shameless cunning, manipulate Rachel into agreeing to the deceit. Once in England, Rachel and the perilously ill grandfather develop a surprisingly strong, affectionate bond, although she continues the ruse, believing that "one more disappointment would be the end of the old man." In a straightforward, sympathetic voice, Rachel tells an involving, episodic story that follows her across continents and through life stages as she grapples with her dishonesty, grief for her lost parents and life in Africa, and looming questions about how to prepare for grown-up life at a time when few choices were allowed to women. Gentle, nostalgic, and fueled with old-fashioned girl power, this involving orphan story will please fans of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden 0 (1912) and Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan 0 (2004). --Gillian Engberg Copyright 2005 Booklist

Horn Book Review

(Intermediate) The Great War is over, but another cruel killer -- influenza -- has spread across the globe, from America to India to British East Africa, where narrator Rachel Sheridan lives with her missionary doctor father and teacher mother. Rachel loves her life at Tumanini -- the landscape, the animals, her work at the mission hospital, and especially her Kikuyu friends. But when her parents die of influenza, Rachel fears that she will have to enter an orphanage. Here the plot departs from the expected, and Rachel's life becomes very complicated indeed. Her shady, despised neighbors, the Pritchards, full of disdain for East Africa and its people, take her in with the intention of passing her off as their daughter (who has also died in the flu epidemic) and using her to acquire an inheritance. With a nod to Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, Burnett's The Secret Garden, and Spyri's Heidi, Whelan spins a tale full of mystery and intrigue that takes our heroine from Africa to England and into a whole new identity. Through her sympathetic narrator, Whelan gives readers a glimpse of life in post-WWI colonial Africa. Rich details of the natural world on two continents, melodramatic twists and turns of plot, and a complicated main character add up to a satisfying, old-fashioned tale. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Raised in British East Africa, Rachel knows well that when parents die, their young are vulnerable to attack. Little does she suspect that the loss of her own British missionary parents to influenza will leave her to the wicked clutches of the neighboring Pritchards. In this satisfying story set in the early 20th century, the money-grubbing Pritchards swap the unassuming 13-year-old Rachel for their spoiled daughter Valerie when Valerie dies, manipulating her into traveling to England to pose as the rich, elderly Mr. Pritchard's granddaughter. The up-until-now somber novel blooms as the orphaned Rachel shares her newfound grandfather's passion for bird watching and bonds with him despite her reluctant impersonation. Though it bogs down with the rehashing of Rachel's internal dilemmas and in African animal metaphors, the story remains irresistible in a The Prince and the Pauper or The Secret Garden sort of way. Readers will cheer as the truth sets Rachel free, and as she, against all odds, becomes a doctor and returns to Africa to rebuild the hospital where her father healed patients before her. (glossary, author's note, bibliography) (Fiction. 12-15) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.