"unusual and captivating...Robyn Scott is also a wonderful writer, with the ability to retrieve essential details from her memory and hone them. Her memoir is a rich tapestry of her Botswana experiences and her eccentric but interesting family. What happened to them is truly a story worth telling." - The Vancouver Sun

She and her siblings were hoisted from the lush pastures of New Zealand and planted in the dry soil of Botswana in 1987, when she was six years old. Her adventurous parents didn't believe their children should be handed anything on a silver platter, so when she requests a new saddle for her horse, she's told she will have to earn it.

A child with an entrepreneurial spirit, she buys 20 chickens and starts selling their free-range eggs to raise funds, hence the title.

Having spent the first two decades of my life just a bit farther south than Scott (in Cape Town, South Africa), I was eager to see how her experiences in Botswana differed from mine. Turns out we could not have had less in common. I dealt with city life and private schooling as a child; her days were largely her own, so she and her siblings explored the African bush.

The only time she was touched by apartheid was during her brief school experience in South Africa. Then she caught a glimpse of the inequality that seeped into all aspects of South African life and was condemned by the rest of the world.

Twenty Chickens offers various perspectives on the life of a white family in Botswana. Scott comes across as someone who was an intelligent but precocious child, home-schooled by her Cambridge-educated mother. In her memories and observations we also see her world through the eyes of her parents and grandparents.

Her father is a doctor who flies to remote country clinics to see up to 100 patients a day. Listening in on the family's dinner-table conversations, we grow to understand his frustration and desperate sadness as HIV claims more and more of his patients.

Her mother, a strong believer in homeopathic medicine, spends her time writing books and teaching her children the lessons of life by getting them to experience it firsthand.

First in a cowshed the family turns into a home and later in a farmhouse by the Limpopo River, Scott and her siblings experience the richness of life in Africa. Twenty Chickens is filled with evocative descriptions of time spent crocodile- and hippo-spotting on the river banks, crossing paths with poisonous snakes, listening for cheetahs and lions in the bush and horseback riding on the veld.

But there are also many logic-defying tales of life in Botswana, such as most locals' refusal to discuss AIDS openly, even as it ravages their lives, leaving as many as 100,000 children orphans. Soon after AIDS first appeared, a government minister cryptically advised Scott's father, "When you are in the bush, you don't talk about the lions."

By the Limpopo, Scott and her family are outsiders not only because of their skin colour but also because of their liberal views. They frequently find themselves at odds with other white farmers in Botswana and with their Afrikaner neighbours in South Africa, many of whom are racists.

When Scott attends school for the first time at age 13, the ways in which she differs from other children come to the fore. Accustomed to questioning and debating issues with her educated parents, she is an anomaly in a classroom where persistent questions aren't welcomed. As she navigates her way through the challenges of academic and social life, she gains a reputation as a leader and a free thinker.

Robyn Scott is also a wonderful writer, with the ability to retrieve essential details from her memory and hone them. Her memoir is a rich tapestry of her Botswana experiences and her eccentric but interesting family. What happened to them is truly a story worth telling.

Lauren Kramer, Saturday 7th June, 2008