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Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey into the Heart of Africa
by Brad Ricca
From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman's quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues.
In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa.
So she went to find him.
Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Making her way in a pair of ill-fitting boots, Olive awakens to the many forces around her, from shadowy colonial powers to an invisible Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd's disappearance. As these secrets begin to unravel, all of Olive's assumptions prove wrong and she is forced to confront the darkest, most shocking secret of all: why she really came to Africa in the first place.
Drawing on Olive's own letters and secret diaries, Olive the Lionheart is a love story that defies all boundaries, set against the backdrop of a beautiful, unconquerable Africa.
This book is not for sale in the United Kingdom.
"MacLeod's diary...is a remarkable resource, and Ricca makes the most of it, while also enriching the narrative with helpful insights into the era's political, cultural, and social tensions. Fans of women's history and adventure stories will cheer this engrossing account." - Publishers Weekly
"Intriguing...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." - Kirkus Reviews
"Ricca makes the most of this engaging story." - Booklist
"This incredible true story of one woman's quest to find her missing fiancé is the perfect summer adventure book. In 1910, Scottish aristocrat Olive MacLeod received word that her fiancé, the famed naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So, she went to find him. Though there are wild animals to fight and inhospitable forests to whack through, MacLeod's incredible journey becomes even stranger as she goes on." - Town & Country
"Olive the Lionheart has it all – secret chambers, lost love, and the dwelling place of a devil. Ricca mines emotions and real fears in this incredible true story." - Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington
"Brad Ricca's Olive MacLeod is my favorite sort of woman from history—bold and unconventional, utterly unsinkable—and her story is so full of adventure and acts of courage, it's hard to believe she actually lived. And yet she did! Brad Ricca has found a heroine for the ages, and written her tale with a winning combination of accuracy and imagination." - Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin and The Paris Wife
This information about Olive the Lionheart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brad Ricca earned his Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University where he currently teaches. The author of Super Boys, he has spoken on comics at various schools and museums, and he has been interviewed about comics topics by the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and All Things Considered on NPR. His film Last Son won a 2010 Silver Ace Award at the Las Vegas International Film Festival. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
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