Wild Life By Keena Roberts - A Review Of A Gripping Memoir

I’m a sucker for a travel memoir, so the fact that I hadn’t even heard of Wild Life by Keena Roberts was a bit of a surprise to me. It was recommended by a fellow digital nomad who knew shares an adoration of Torre Deroche and said I’d like Wild Life: Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs by Keena Roberts. And she was right.

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What I liked about Wild Life by Keena Roberts

Keena Roberts is not only a great writer and storyteller, but she has also had a remarkable life.
I like that she INCLUDED pictures THROUGHOUT the book! This is such a rare thing in memoirs it seems, but having a sense of the camp, her family, and her life was so cool and refreshing.
This quote: “Between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., though, it was too hot to function. We left the baboons and came back to camp, schoolwork stopped, and we sequestered ourselves in various shady spots around camp to sweat out the day. It was too hot to read. It was too hot to talk, too hot to eat, and too hot to sleep. We tried playing cards and darts, but the conversation inevitably turned to just how fucking hot it was.” As someone who is literally an immigrant in an African country right now… girl, same.
Keena does a really good job of capturing the feeling of being somewhere and being shaped by somewhere, but not really belonging there.

Parts of the book were a little bit monotonous. Go to school, summer, school, summer. Her childhood seemed a bit… stifling? Maybe the lack of supporting characters or “other” friends besides her two main friends amplified this feeling, but her private school seemed incredibly small and claustrophobic. But, isn’t that kind of how childhood is? Things seem repetitive, monotonous, small and boring until you start your “real” life. Keena Roberts did a great job of invoking that sense of plodding nostalgia, interspersed by rhinos and hippos.
What a cool family. Her parents are truly parent goals, and I hope to drag my future kids into the wilderness to study animals. Is it too late to become a famous and successful researcher? But… there were a few times where I was like, “dang, guys.” Drinking alcohol at, like, 8? Driving through crocodiles? I’m no parent so I can’t definitively say I wouldn’t let my 12-year-old drive a boat through hippo-infested water, but there were a few moments where I was side-eyeing the parenting choices.