| eedlessly bloody and preachy. -OOO- Stephen
Davies
OUTLAW (2011) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2011. Hardcover. 304 pp. ISBN: 0547390173 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 09/28/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * * review: Born in England in 1976, author Stephen Davies now lives with his wife Charlie as a missionary on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Burkina Faso (BF), formerly Upper Volta. He writes books for children, including the recent (2010) boys adventure tale HACKING TIMBUKTU. Davies's boys adventure story for 2011 is OUTLAW. Jake Knight, the rather thoughtless 15-year old son of the British Ambassador to BF, finds everything in his English boarding school boring except his smart phone. One of his parkur pranks (he vaults on a dare into a prison yard, but can't vault back out) gets him suspended from Waltham College for four months. So it's off to BF's capital Ouagadougou to rejoin his father, mother and 13-year old sister anti-imperialist rebellious Kirsty better known as Kas. Kas is kidnapped and held for ransom in a plot by evil parties in BF out to blame an 18-year old African boy named the Chameleon and to get British Intelligence and the army to blow up the Chameleon and his band of young people ("The Friends of the Poor") who right wrongs in francophone BF and neighboring countries. By the way, Jake was kidnapped as an unplanned afterthought along with his sister, merely because he tried to save her. Indeed things go well for the evil plotters, one of whose leaders is BF's top police official. The innocent Friends of the Poor are targeted by Britain for extinction by smart bomb. Meanwhile Jake and Kas work with Jake's ever present smart phone to convince their father the Ambassador that the Robin Hood wannabe Friends of the Poor had nothing to do with the siblings' kidnapping. OUTLAW is fast paced, reminiscent of R. Sydney Bowen's 15 boys adventure novels set in World War II involving American teen Dave Dawson flying for the R.A.F. But OUTLAW also becomes notably preachy and persistently strident. OUTLAW excoriates foreign gold extraction companies for taking jobs away from natives. It highlights corruption in the BF government and features a clearly insane MI-6 British Intelligence officer who commits, unchallenged, cold blooded murder of children active in Friends of the Poor because he, like James Bond before him, is "licensed to kill." OUTLAW also preaches non-violence and a few other values. Read this book for atmospherics of outlaw and ordinary daily life in Burkina Faso and for the ability of young people of different cultures, languages and religions to find common ground. OUTLAW is an average book moving at a faster than average pace. Do not expect rounded three-dimensional characters. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/435667332.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 09/29/2011 name of review: "we've spent the whole evening stuffing ourselves with gold" rating: * * * review: Two siblings are kidnapped -- Jake Knight, the 15-year old son and Kirsty,13-year old daughter of the British Ambassador to Ouagadougou (sometimes shortened to Ouga, pronounced WAH-gah),capital of Burkina Faso (BF - formerly Upper Volta while part of colonial French West Africa). Defenders of BF's corrupting alliances with the West (including foreign extractors of BF's gold deposits) have staged the kidnapping to entice Her Majesty's Government to drop a smart bomb on a bunch of teen age rebels called Friends of the Poor. Leader of Friends of the Poor is an 18-year old African called variously The Chameleon or Yakuuba Sor. Just before the kidnapping, the Ambassador's family had been attending a lavish dinner at Ougadougou's posh Hotel Libya, celebrating ten years since a foreign corporation bought BF's century old gold mines "from the government and drove hundrds of indigenous workers off their ancestral land," reports eco-conscious Kirsty. Gold abounded all around the banquet room: in candlesticks, knives, forks and more. Kirsty was furious that the non-African gold barons flaunted their wealth in such a poor country. As for dessert: "Each minitorte
was smothered in warm chocolate fudge sauce and decorated lavishly with
gold leaf. .. genuine twenty-for-carat gold. ... Don't worry,
Kirsty, (said Mrs Knight) it's
perfectly edible."
Kirsty tells her bee-keeper mother, who is oblivious to distributive justice, of having minutes earlier seen a leprous African woman, with two children, begging in the hotel parking lot. "Do
you think our friend in the parking lot will swear when I tell her
we've spent the whole evening stuffing ourselves with gold?" (Ch.
6)
The childen had sat across the table from the French-speaking Police Commissioner of BF. He had told them how evil were the Friends of the Poor. Later, the slingshot-firing Friends of the Poor, led by the genuine Yakuuba Sor, rescue Jake and Kirsty from two hirelings of the evil Police Commissioner, one of whom had pretended to be the Chameleon. Using his smart phone, Jake contacts his father and pleads for the Children of the Poor: latter-day Robin Hoods they are, with good hearts. His father does not at first believe the accusations against the Police Commissioner. Meanwhile a decidedly loopy, dangerous British Intelligence representative with License to Kill, appears on the scene from London. He uses a trained beetle with embedded tracking advice to trace kidnapped Jake. When he catches up with leading young Friends of the Poor, he shoots them down in cold blood. He is later commended by HM's Government. THE OUTLAW is a violent, bloody short novel. It also rails against injustices, corruption within Burkino Faso, arrogance of the West v. the Third World and automatic gravitation of the British and other Westerners to the powerful rather than the downtrodden. On the other hand, if you set aside the ranting, preaching and violence, THE OUTLAW is a very fast paced boys and girls adventure tale set in exotic West Africa. Author Stephen Davies is a Christian missionary resident in the fabled desert country of northern BF. On his web site he says that he loves to tell little African children simple tales of Jesus. Davies can indeed spin a yarn. He can also make his yarn didactic as all get out. All in all, a thoroughly ordinary, average book. There is little point in serious adults' reading it. But early teens may just eat it up. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/d/UserReview-Stephen _Davies_OUTLAW-74-1766767-213831-_we_ve_ spent_the_whole_evening_stuffing_ourselves.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 10/01/2011 title of review: British Intelligence sends a psychotic agent to Africa "licensed to kill" rating: * * * review: The 2011 novel OUTLAW was written for 12-year olds by Stephen Davies, a married English Christian missionary resident in Burkina Faso -- a West African country called Upper Volta when it was a French colony. This children's book is disturbingly and graphically violent. It also trumpets none too subtly a number of value-laden political messages. The underlying didactic message is that Burkina Faso (call it BF for short) is far less independent than it should be. Western consortia that control its gold mines exert an immoral influence on a government too easily tempted by easy money to do justice to its people. And a notably brainless British diplomatic presence lends itself more or less unwittingly to schemes by evil people inside BF government to use Britain's smart bombs to wipe out a group of rebellious Robin Hood wannabe youngsters out for justice. That is a lot of didactic baggage for a novel about a spoiled 15-year old English boy named Jake Knight and his idealistic 13-year old sister Kirsty kidnapped allegedly in order to force Britain to release political prisoners. Jake and Kirsty are the offspring of the British Ambassador and his bee-keeping wife (keep your eye on those bees!). The Police Commissioner of BF is the deadly enemy of 18-year old African Yakuuba Sor aka The Chameleon who leads the young idealists calling themselves Friends of the Poor. The Commissioner is behind the kidnapping, designed to put the blame on innocent Yakuuba Sor and induce HM's Goverment to annihilate Friends of the Poor. The evil plot comes uncomfortably close to succeeding. Consider one of the unwitting but willing British tools of the evil BF schemers. His name is Roy Dexter, "MI6 officer," blue eyed, square jawed "and his long sun bleached hair was tied back in a ponytail" (Ch. 16). He has flown in from London to help the Ambassador retrieve his kidnapped son and daughter. But Roy Dexter announces an additional mission "to kill Yakuuba Sor." Dexter appears frightened. Earlier torture during a failed mission in Turkmenistan convinced him that in the future he must shoot first, ask questions later. To trace the children, Dexter will use a four centimeter long live rhinoceros beetle with embedded tracing device. It is called HI-MEMS, short for Hybrid Insect-Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System." After many adventures, Dexter's beetle leads him to a hospital where the Ambassador's children are attending to an injured associate of the real Yakuuba Sor who has rescued them from the pretended Yakuuba Sor, the kidnapper. Roy Dexter refuses to listen to the children's explanation of what really happened. Before their eyes and in cold blood, Dexter first fires his pistol at a drip bag delivering vital medicine to a wounded youngster, then shoots him dead, then shoots the attending doctor in the stomach, then another patient. Yakuuba Sor escapes and brings the children back to the British Embassy in Ougadougou. There a disbelieving Jake re-encounters the murderous Roy Dexter. Dexter, the Ambassador explains, is "licensed to kill" and the British Foreign Office has accepted his account of necessary "collateral damage" in rescuing the children. There is one more hi-tech close call from a British smart bomb before Jake and Yakuuba live to fight again another day. But I leave that reading to you. I find this a very average adventure tale for 12-year old readers, n http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/outlaw -stephen-davies/1100692307 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 10/01/2011 title of review: Can corrupt African adults tolerate young Africans passionate for justice? rating: * * * review: I do not find Stephen Davies's children's novel of 2011 OUTLAW easy to evaluate. But the more I read it, the less I like. So let me do a bit of analysis and evaluation of five elements of OUTLAW: plot ... violence ... .. moral or message(s) ... frame and structure ... characters: Kirsty, Friends of the Poor. I. THE PLOT
Two teen-age siblings are kidnapped and driven into the desert. They are the two children of the British Ambassador to Burkina Faso (the French called it Upper Volta when it was their colony). The boy, Jake Knight, is 15 and has just been suspended from his posh English boarding school. Why? For using parkur techniques to leap over a wall into a prison on a dare. But once in, he could not escape. So he is sent away to Ouagadougou, the near-Saharan capital of Burkina Faso (let's call it BF for short) to join his motorcycle-riding diplomat father, beekeeper mother and 13-year old Kirsty, better known as Kas. The day after Jake's humiliating arrival the Knight family attend a banquet celebrating ten years of a foreign consortium's profitable management of BF's gold reserves. From this lavish meal (gold knives, forks, even desserts, etc.) Kas is kidnapped. Trying to rescue her, Jake is overpowered and taken along as an extra negotiating asset. Jake uses his smart phone to alert his father. Later the kidnappers make him use that instrument to photograph and send to FaceBook Kas reading aloud a French language demand for release of political prisoners in Britain. The kidnappers are in false identity, in the pay of BF's corrupt Commissioner of Police. On their way to being shot, Jake and Kas are rescued by a gang calling itself Friends of the Poor. They attack the kidnappers with slingshots Eventually their 18-year old leader Yakuuba Sor aka The Chameleon smuggles Jake and Kas past the Police Commissioner's guards back into the ambassadorial compound. The Chameleon and his young idealists had been effectively framed for the kidnapping by evil elements within the BF Establishment. As a result Great Britain is taking clandestine steps to annihilate the Friends. Using parkur techniques, Yakuuba Sor escapes the ambassador's compound with the help of angry bees who attack the police forces chasing the young African. Towards novel's end, Yakuuba and Jake have met up in the abandoned Red Cross desert camp used by the Friends of the Poor as a base. Her Majesty's government has been suckered by the Commissioner and cronies into believing the frame-up and is well along towards dropping a smart bomb on the compound. Will the brave lads survive? Read OUTLAW to find out. If OUTLAW constrained itself into being merely a very fast paced, action packed, hi-tech adventure tale for 12-year old readers and placed in exotic African urban and desert settings, I would give OUTLAW high marks, say 4.5 stars: * * * * 1/2. II. VIOLENCE
OUTLAW is an unspeakably violent, bloody read for 12-year olds. A loony British Intelligence officer unnecessarily shoots an African doctor, two of his injured patients and almost succeeds in shooting his target, Yakuuba Sor. The MI6 man is "licensed to kill" and his killings are retroactively approved by London. And this is only one of several incidents of needlessly graphic violence, including fatal stings of BF police by the Ambassador's wife's bees. For needless, tasteless violence: One star *. III. NOVEL'S MORAL OR
MESSAGE(S)
OUTLAW is unabashedly didactic. Some teaching is factually informational, e.g. about the landscape of BF and about hi-tech smart bombs and a tiny British Intelligence beetle with an implanted micro-homing device. Other teaching is, by contrast, heavy-handed preaching and denuncation of the ills of the greedy West which has driven out Africans who had mined gold for centuries. The British Embassy has stupidly allowed itself to become a pawn of evil forces in BF who persuade MI6 to do in the honorable young Robin Hood wannabes, the Friends of the Poor. The MI6 man, who is sent overnight from London to help the ambassador find his children, is a trigger-happy, psychotic pony-tailed hippy. For overdrawn preachiness: Two Stars **. IV. NOVEL'S FRAMEWORK,
STRUCTURE
The novel is structured as a struggle between good and evil, with some of the good people inadvertently, stupidly, playing into the hands of enemies of Friends of the Poor and of justice for the people of BF. Villains include the Police Commissioner, his thugs, the loony MI6 gunman, the foreign companies plundering BF's gold, a charlatan Sheikh, grain-merchants and others. Good-hearted but slow on the uptake are Ambassador Knight, his bee-keeper wife and 15-year old Jake. All are cardboard, one-dimensional "types." Two Stars **. What redeems the didactic/preachy pages of OUTLAW are 13-year old, but, alas, one-dimensional Kirsty/Kas. At least she among the Europeans shows pity for a leprous beggar woman seen outside the luxurious Hotel Libya where the banquet takes place. Young Kas also resents the widely admired con job being done on BF by the non- African gold corporations. Standing out among the flawed, immature but justice-seeking characters are the Friends of the Poor. They plus the chase/adventure narrative redeem OUTLAW as much as the other baggage can possibly grant it redemption. We meet the Friends of the Poor in Chapter Two. The Chameleon, their 18-year old leader, is a master of disguise. He uses this mastery to seek out and observe charlatans who play on African superstitions to fleece herdsmen of their sheep and goats. The Friends entice a charlatan Sheikh to accept their hospitality. Their business is to teach evil men a lesson. But their leader Yakuuba Sor admonishes: "Wicked
men are very rare. ... Unimaginative men are far more common. Talk to
them ... help them to see that they have a choice" (Ch. 8).
Later The Chameleon teaches a lesson to the greedy grain-merchants of Djibo, who jack up prices unjustly when people are hungriest (Ch.10). Later yet, Yakuuba and the Friends of the Poor free Jake and Kirsty from the Police Commissioner's kidnapping goons who have pretended to be Yakuuba Sor & Co. They deliver the children back to their parents. The Friends fight with slingshots, not modern weapons and they have wide popular backing against the corrupt government. For the Friends of the Poor, warts and all: Four Stars * * * * . On balance OUTLAW is too pretentious to be good. The basic, unpadded story moves rapidly along from escapade to escapade, from chase to rescue to a Goliath United Kingdom about to launch a smart bomb against David Yakuuba Sor, with the Ambassador's son now firmly on the Chameleon's side. As against that upbeat element, there are violence, one-dimensional characters, implausibly dumb British diplomats and an even more implausible intelligence officer "with license to kill." This is a disappointingly average novel for 12-year old readers -- at best. -OOO- https://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/product? ie=UTF8&asin=0547390173 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 10/02/2011 Review Title: "People say that the deserts of the north are a battlefield for angels and demons" Product Rating: * * PROS: Fast moving adventures in exotic Saharan Africa. Idealistic African teens hated by corrupt adults. CONS: Dragged down by anti-Western preachiness, one-dimensional characters, excessive violence, an obtuse British Ambassador. BOTTOM LINE: Read OUTLAWS if and only if you are a diehard fan of (1) missionary author Stephen Davies or of (2) recent doings and scenery in one-time French West Africa. aohcapablanca's Full Review: The year 2010 brought us the remarkably good novel for teens, HACKING TIMBUKTU. Its author Stephen Davies called it "perhaps the first-ever parkour novel." I was so impressed that I recently asked amazon.com/vine to send me Davies's about to appear novel for 12-year old readers, OUTLAWS. I am, frankly, disappointed in OUTLAWS. Why? With the possible exception of a bunch of teen age African Robin Hoods calling themselves The Friends of the Poor, led by 18-year old Yaakuba Sor aka The Chameleon, the characters in OUTLAWS are flatter than yeastless pancakes. The author, a Christian missionary resident with his wife in northern Burkina Faso (one time Upper Volta) tells us elsewhere that he loves to tell stories of gentle Jesus and the Bible to young African children. Yet in OUTLAWS the violence, at times utterly pointless, seems to smother the narrative. For example: a near psychotic British Intelligence (MI6) pony-tailed operative is rushed from London to help Her Majesty's ineffective ambassador in Ougadougou recover his two kidnapped children from feared (without reason) Friends of the Poor. But those African kids didn't do it! It was a frame-up job. The evil Police Commissioner of Burkina Faso (let's call that country BF from now on) sent a couple of his goons to do the deed. The goons succeeded and made the brother and sister think that the Chameleon and his young cutthroats were holding them to force London to release convicted terrorists from prison. The thugs compel 13-year old Kirsty aka Kas to read in French a set of non-negotiable demands that her 15-year old brother Jake Knight was made to photograph on his smart phone and then post on Facebook. The kidnappers next calmly prepare to shoot the British teens and blame it all on the Friends of the Poor. A handful of the latter, led by charismatic Yakuuba Sor in person, ride up on horses and attack the kidnappers and their van. The van is lured into a gore-splattered wreck after Kas and Jake leap out. One more sample of the violence: close to insane "licensed to kill," MI 6 operative Roy Dexter pursues Yakuuba Sor and the Friends via a hi-tech tracking device implanted in a live beetle. When he catches up with some of the youthful African leaders in a hospital, he guns down the attending doctor who professes to admire all things British, along with two severely injured patients. The Chameleon and his new admirers Jake and Kas escape the madman and after more adventures make it to Ougadougou and the Ambassador's residence. There they re-encounter London's gunman Roy Dexter who has been cleared of wrong for "collateral damage" (the murders) in his efforts to date to exterminate the Friends of the Poor. The evil Commissioner of Police violates the Embassy's sovereign immunity and pursues a successfully fleeing parkour master, the Chameleon, on Embassy grounds. During the pursuit, the Commissioner and some of his men succumb to hundreds of bee stings. Those creatures belonged to the Ambassador's beekeeping wife and were unleashed by bullets pouring into the hives that the fleeing Yakuuba Sor hid behind. The minutely described deaths were horrible. In addition to the violence, there is preaching. Jake has been suspended for four months because of a school boy prank done on a dare: using parkour to scale a wall into a nearby prison but then finding he could not get back out. The day after his less than triumphant reunion with parents and sister in Ougadougo (aka Ouaga), capital of BF, the Knight family attend a sumptuous banquet celebrating ten years of success by evil multinational corporations in taking over and running for a profit the northern gold mines from Africans whose families had been mining there for centuries. Kas is outraged by the multi-national injustice and appalled by the irony of her family's eating with gold knives and forks and downing a gold-wrapped dessert while just outside the Hotel Libya a poor African leper woman with two nursing children begs for scraps. A second message of OUTLAWS is that British embassies are staffed with obtuse incompetents who automatically side with the rich against the poor and are unwitting pawns used by clever African fat cats to portray as international terrorists and then exterminate the popular young African Robin Hoods that dare to stand up for justice. In the end, too much unnecessary baggage prevents me from taking OUTLAWS seriously. There is far too much violence and excessive moraliatic preaching and there are too few (read "none") three-dimensional characters. If you could be rid of those elements you might have left an impressive, fast-paced 4-star adventure yarn for 12-year olds. There is also the mystery of Africa. "My people say that the deserts of the north are a battlefield for angels and demons" (ch. 6). Too bad it is the corrupt Police Commisioner who says so to Jake and his sister. But the Commissioner is right. Author Davies does a good job of bringing to life the heat, the dunes and aridity, the insects and the wealth divide among the Saharan Africans of BF. He also brings in parkour escape skills that are popular with young readers, and gives a nod to nerdish fans of hi-tech through MI6's smart beetle and via a British drone and smart bomb poised to wipe out Friends of the Poor. Furthermore, Stephen Davies makes his creature, 15-year old Jake Knight, very adept with and much in love with his expensive smart phone. Beyond that: OUTLAWS offers a fast-moving narrative that children would love, if a ruthless editor cut back the violence and the preaching and added at least one dimension more to the characters. Do I recommend this book to most readers? Decidedly not. I will not, however, be so bold as to try to stop fans of Stephen Davies or of Burkina Faso from turning the pages of OUTLAWS. -OOO- p.s. Thank you, DramaStef, for making this book reviewable for epinions readers. Recommended: NO! http://www.epinions.com/review/Stephen_Davies _Outlaw_epi/content_565747289732 =--=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/davies_outlaw.html file: davies_outlaw |