Cover Image: Olive the Lionheart

Olive the Lionheart

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Member Reviews

What a fantastic read. I thought it was fiction at first, given how absorbing and engaging the writing is. Remarkable but unknown women in history is one of my favorite finds.

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From the history, Olive Macleod sounds like a courageous, formidable woman. I love the premise of telling her story and the story of the lands she travelled. Yet, the telling of the story in Olive the Lionheart by Brad Ricca leaves me a bit baffled because it seems more focused on the emotional reason for Olive Macleod's journey rather than the journey itself. Nevertheless, I am glad to have discovered the history.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2020/03/olive-lionheart.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

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Olive did interesting things, but she wasn't a particularly interesting person, so this book was quite a bit dryer than I expected. Not my favorite.

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For some reason, anything set in Africa always steals my heart. Authors that set their books in Africa seem to have such a love and respect of the land, and it really shines through in their writing. This novel/story included.

Fabulously written and so descriptive. I have loved it from the first page and was engrossed with the story the whole way. I think knowing it was based on a true story and experience always makes the reader feel more,,, it totally did with this one!

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for my complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review. Please excuse my tardiness in posting my review as my TBR continuously grows and I keep finding so many book with so little time!

So much gratitude for this copy shared with me, always xo

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Olive the Lionheart by Brad Ricca is the true story of Olive Macleod and her adventure through Africa as she searches for answers to her fiancé’s disappearance. Join Olive as she journeys through modern day Nigeria and Lake Chad as she encounters people, animals, and lands rarely seen by women in the early 1900s.

I was very intrigued by Olive’s story and couldn’t wait to read a true account of such a strong woman in a time period accustomed to women who didn’t travel or take risks. I love historical non-fiction and wanted to love Olive the Lionheart. While the subject matter was very interesting, I just feel like the final product didn’t quite measure up to the potential of the story. The book was longer than I was hoping and got slow in parts. But, the author tackled a little known story and made Olive shine. Overall, I would recommend this book because it sheds light on a women’s story in a time when women were rarely singled out and highlighted.

Thank you to NetGalley for the copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

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The meat of the story here is good and the book has really great potential, but it seems to drag and like it is an unfinished book overall. It does more telling than showing, and I would think more lush description would be possible with this setting. The narrative is too weak for my liking.

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This was an enjoyable woman’s fiction book. If you like the subject you will enjoy. I would read this author again.

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Olive the Lionheart: Lost Love, Imperial Spies, and One Woman's Journey Into the Heart of Africa by Brad Ricca is the true story of a British woman who goes to West and Central Africa in search of her fiance, an explorer who has been reportedly murdered there. It's 1911, and Olive is indefatigable and fearless as she travels with a couple, the Talbots, who have a fair bit if experience in the area. Ricca skillfully and carefully molds and develops the story with all the documentation he can find: letters, diaries, books, and other information. The ethnographic and historical exploration of the area is fascinating, incorporating the challenges of geography, local people not particularly used to foreign intruders, and Olive's interactions with the French and British colonialists. Olive proves to be a redoubtable and inquisitive traveler, and the development of her character among all these challenges compels the book forward. Ricca is careful to present Olive without imposing his own interpretations of her personality but to let her speak for herself. Highly recommended.

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This book had a lot of potential, but the pace really lost it for me. I found Olive to be kind of wishy-washy in the beginning with her feelings and decisions, but once she sets out for Africa she definitely had more of a spine. That sounded like quite a hard journey for an aristocrat. Regardless, the whole thing just kind of plodded along at a slow pace and even the exciting incidents didn't spark a lot of interest. The history and geography was interesting, but this was not the exciting journey that I expected.

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Get ready for a great book! I could not put this one down. Full of adventure, lush descriptions, and a young lady that is going to have you wanting to read more - this is a must-have for this year!
Olive goes on the adventure of a lifetime, trying to find her missing fiance - and uncovering quite a bit more in the process.

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This book was just ok for me. I loved learning more about Olive and her aristocratic privileged and life exploring Africa from her POV, but the writing style of this book seemed off to me. It seemed like Brad Ricca wanted to write the book as a novel but kept shying away then starting down that path again. Didn't completely kill the book for me, but it did make it a little frustrating and difficult to read.
I have recommended this book to others that may enjoy the stylistic choices of the author more than I did, and I can see how the ability to tell a story that hasn't been told is valuable to the historical human record-Overall, just three stars for me.

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In early 1910, Olive McLeod searched for the final resting place of her fiancé, lost in Africa. With a great cover, the book seems a little bland, unfleshed out perhaps. Only my opinion.

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I love Olive, impetuous, bright, brave, determined and willing to do what it takes, no matter how hard, to reach her goals. And the author is brilliant to step back and let Olive tell her own story and let us see her thought process and actions in her own words.

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This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

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To be honest, I was expecting this book to be a lot more exciting, and I am disappointed. When I became a member of NetGalley at the beginning of 2020 this was one of the first books I requested. I couldn't resist it, but I could not get interested in the e-galley of the book, and never finished it. I got a hard copy of it from the library and read it. It was a wonderful premise, with a great heroine, but I think the problem is that the story was told as a narrative. Perhaps a bit more author's lenience would have been helpful. I mean that, this was a true story. The author used memoir, personal letters, and newspaper articles to tell the story of Olive MacLeod, who went on an adventure to Africa in 1910 to find her missing fiancé.

In this book, Olive really does become a great heroine. She faces all that you can imagine on her adventure and learns more than she expected.

Although I didn't love this book, I am happy to have given it my time. I was unaware of this history and very pleased to have met Olive.

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This was such an enjoyable book, and only reaffirmed my desire to visit more of Africa than I already have. As 2020 became the year everyone was stuck at home, this book took me on a great adventure from my couch.

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i really enjoyed meeting Olive MacLeod, and I really enjoyed reading this book. The characters were great and I really enjoyed the authors writing style.

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I really enjoyed reading about Olive and her adventures and mishaps as she traveled through Africa. I found the writing did not always keep me engaged, however, I think Olive's story is amazing and one worth reading! I hope readers will give this book a chance and learn about the fascinating life of Olive Macleod.

Thank you so much to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read Olive the Lionheart in exchange for my honest review.

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Great cover, interesting real-life heroine, premise that could have made a great book, but lacking in the execution. It feels like the author took each diary entry he found and wrote a fictionalized sketch of what happened, and then no one edited them, as the narrative jumps from scene to scene without warning and words are repeated too often within pages. Also, not to give too much away of the ending, but the setup of the book seemed like it was leading to a different outcome and was thus quite jarring when it switched gears.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

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A fantastic adventure with an exceptional protagonist, Olive the Lionheart was a good read, but the narrative style Brad Ricca chose kept it from being a great read.

The best way I can think of to describe this is tentative, as if Ricca chose to write Olive’s story as a novel, but never fully committed to that style, instead feeling compelled to maintain the emotional distance of her journals. The whole thing reads very flat, without the tension or drama that clearly marked so much of her journey. The few attempts to wring some tension out of the story feel forced, as if he put them in just because readers would expect them, not because they fit with the story he was telling. It didn’t help that the story jump backward and forward in time, mixing journal entries, letters, and narrative chapters where the dates sometimes didn’t correlate. It may be an issue with the ARC, and not a reflection of the finished book, but I got confused several times on when things happened.

Stylistic complaints aside, I found Olive to be a fantastic heroine, truly a woman ahead of her time. Her passion, dedication, and courage almost feel anachronistic for the time, especially given her station, but I loved that she never explains or apologizes for it. She is the driving force behind many of the adventures, a leader even in some cases (the search for the waterfalls comes to mind), and while her curiosity gets her into trouble more than once (the narrow escape from the women being kidnapped sticks with me), I loved that fearlessness. She (and her companions) are a product of their time, of course, which leads to some uncomfortable moments of racism, but to gloss over them or eliminate them from the story would be an unfair revision of history.

The journey itself is spectacular, a true travelogue of an Africa of a different age. The landscape, the animals, the civilizations, the people, it’s all fascinating, and the novelty of Olive seeing so much of it for the first time adds to the sense of exploration. While there’s a frustrating distance to the narrative that makes it hard to really appreciate the journey, there are moments of splendor where you can just imagine being there.

In the end, I’m glad I had the chance to meet Olive, and I certainly don’t begrudge the read, I just wish Ricca had been bolder in his narrative choices. Olive the Lionheart wasn’t the thrilling adventure I wanted, but it was still a fascinating read.

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