Spoilers ahead!



A Swiss woman drops everything to follow a man she lusts for based on his appearance and his smell. Yes. Seriously. She knows nothing about his culture and they can’t even communicate in a shared language. Then we’re expected to be surprised when it doesn’t work out? Shocker!

I enjoyed reading this. This book is certainly not without its flaws (as a lot of the other reviews stated, and I will not go into).The style of writing seemed a little basic, but I will still give it 3 stars as it kept me captivated and I enjoyed the theme of the whole book.

This book was recommended by a friend who recently spent two weeks in Tanzania with the Masai people. It is the true account of a Swiss tourist who, while traveling in Kenya, falls in love with a Masai warrior. She gives up everything and moves to Kenya where she marries him and has a child.

Reading this book was extremely frustrating...it's like the car wreck that you know is going to happen and you wish you could close the book but you just keep reading...of course it doesn't end well--it would be impossible for it to end well! Hofmann, of course, can't live his lifestyle--mud hut, malaria, all-protein diet, female circumcision, etc. etc. etc. I guess my greatest frustration was with her naive, "love will conquer all" attitude. She was 27 years old at the time, but she seemed more like 15. She's lucky that she was able to escape from it all.

This is a great book for anyone who is contemplating an intercultural marriage.

I didn't like it until the end when she finally left her husband.

I hope she learned something from that relationship, such as being handsome is not enough to get married and have a child.. I mean pretty obvious stuff.. but good thing I guess that she put out this book. Probably more people in the world like her.

I almost gave up on this book - I didn't find the writing all that good, and the premise of lifelong love at first sight (literally!) seemed a little silly. But the adventure part caught me up - and her travels in the Land Rover were especially interesting.

Living in Hawaii, with its many ethnicities, I could relate to the misunderstandings and the frustrations of dealing with another culture.

While I am still suspect of the whole romance angle (love or just lust?), the adventure story was worth the reading.

(Content warning for racism, misogyny, FGM and miscarriage in my review!)
I am running out of books to read in lockdown and picked this from my mother's bookshelf. I didn't have high expectations and it was just as bad as I expected.
The author is racist, and potentially mentally ill. The fact that she seemingly falls in love for a man who belongs to a culture that does not treat women well, and that during their relationship her physical, emotional and sexual needs are NEVER met, I can only conclude that the author has some kind of sexual fetish or mental illness.
Beginning the book is an extremely uncomfortable experience: the words 'alien' and 'exotic' are used multiple times in the first few chapters. Once I accepted that this was not going to be an easy read, and take the author's racism and orientalism for granted, you can settle a bit with the book.
What follows is a dirge of self-imposed misery, horror and hardship - there is no doubt that what this woman goes through is awful, and it would be hard not to feel sympathy for her suffering. What angered me, however, is the author's continuing attitude towards the people she has surrounded herself with, particularly women. The appalling treatment of women in this culture is passed over without barely a thought - FGM, for example, is given the briefest consideration, but only because there is a small danger that the author herself might have to go through it. At no point does the author express sympathy or horror for what the women she shares a community with have and will have to endure. There is an awful episode where the author witnesses a stillbirth, and the narrative is centred on the author's personal horror and barely a thought is spared to the woman who almost died herself. The author's main complaint, repeatedly, is that people treat her differently because she is white. I don't have time or energy to open that can of worms.

Maybe it's not fair to expect any better from a memoir, but my main takeaway from reading this book is that it laid bare the author's small mindedness. Don't bother with this book.

One of the very few books in my life I didn't finish reading. Every time something went wrong, and believe me about everything turns out to go wrong sooner or later in this story, I started to get annoyed more and more with the author, her overly romantic yet totally unrealistic expectations into one of the most extreme relationship scenarios one can imagine and into which nobody besides herself had pushed her. After managing about half of the book, I gave it to a friend who saw it at my house and mentioned she wanted to read it, making her promise to never bring it back to me.

I won't speak to the personality, character, or -perhaps- mental health of the author in this review. I believe memoirs should be rated based on how they engage the reader and how well they are written.

On both counts, I think this book is a solid four.

I find it hard to believe that this is a love story! A one-way love story perhaps because I don’t think he actually loved her! Maybe he loved the idea of a white woman throwing herself on him, providing for him, and bringing in money! It was clear that he didn’t love her, but she imposed herself on him and stuck around! He wasn’t even handsome!!

Love should be mutual, it should include common things and mutual interests! None of that was present in such a relation even the physical aspect of it was disappointing for her!

I just don’t get it! She is European and well educated, I can’t believe she accepted to be treated like that and being thought of as unfaithful! Years of hard work for women rights and how they should be perceived and treated were swept away by her actions!!

I was quite a frustrating read for me!

Sjukt cool bok! En självbiografi som beskriver vad kärlek kan leda en till. En fascinerande inblick i den kenyanska kulturen :)

I struggled with this book. The beginning is so unbelievable that I was left feeling uncomfortable by how shallow this woman was. I find it ironic that she has said in an interview that a lot of people are uncomfortable with the fact that she married and had a baby with a black man. As a mother of two biracial sons, I can guarantee that is not what made me uncomfortable. What made me uncomfortable was her complete lack of regard for the culture she barged her way into. She didn't know the first thing about cultural mores or expectations. She didn't even know the man she was supposedly in love with. How do you fall in love with someone that you cannot communicate with, have little to nothing in common with, doesn't even satisfy you physically, and has dramatically different ideas on gender equality, raising children and life than you do?? And every time she called him "my warrior" or "my Masai" I found my teeth clenching. She didn't win him at the carnival and yet the feeling that I got was that she felt she had won a rare prize.

Thankfully the book doesn't get bogged down completely in the "romance" aspect. Her adventures in the bush, her struggles to understand her role in the community and all the characters she meets adds immensely to the book's appeal. It is interesting in that respect and as the love between her and Lketinga cool off I was able to enjoy the story more. I really wish I could give it another half star but I can't justify giving it 3 stars so I'm going with the lower rating.

Qué tenía en la cabeza esta mujer cuando se decidió por vivir esta aventura?
Sería amor lo que sintió?
Será que existe el verdadero amor? Mi respuesta es DEFINITIVAMENTE SÍ.
El problema no es el amor, que es Universal, sino los convencionalismos que rigen las relaciones en pareja.
Es una utopía, pero si desaparecieran las fronteras y las religiones y nos limitáramos a desarrollar empatía y compasión, no tendríamos necesidad de esperar ni desear ir al cielo; viviríamos en el propio Paraíso!

Como obra literaria, creo que podria haberse mejorado con detalles que de pronto consideré necesarios.
Como historia: INCREÍBLE!!!