I choose the books I read for many different reasons—because I know and like the writer, because I know someone who knows and likes the writer, because I like the setting or the subject, and even because I like the cover. I avoid books for many of the same reasons as well—because I’m not interested in the topic, or not impressed with the person who recommended the book, don’t like the setting or don’t like the jacket. Neely Tucker’s book Love in the Driest Season tipped the scales almost evenly. I was supposed to read it for my book group, which was a black mark against it—the group has been picking books I haven’t liked for the last six months. It was a memoir about one couple’s determination to adopt a child; another checkmark against. Not that I’m against adoption, but I’m pretty much the most non-maternal woman on the planet. My biological clock troubles me not at all. I have been hitherto unmoved and uninterested in memoirs devoted to people for whom children represent some ultimate sense of fulfillment. On the other hand, the memoir is set largely in Africa, a place that holds great fascination for me, and I recognized the name of the author as a journalist for whom I had some respect. The cover wasn’t bad either.

But in the end, none of this was as important as what ultimately made me decide to read the book—the writing. Specifically, this paragraph at the beginning of chapter one:

There are moments in life, no more than two or three, when everything changes and you find yourself swept along in a series of events that are beyond your measure. And so it was that I picked up the girl-child one day in an orphanage at the epicenter of the world’s AIDS crisis, in a country where foreign journalists, including myself, would shortly be declared to be enemies of the state. She regarded me with worried eyes and a whimper, and then she closed her left hand around my little finger. 

Within ninety-six hours she would come to mean everything to my wife and me.

Life happens, but all too often it happens without us. We worry out our days consumed with small concerns, but every now and then we find ourselves fortunate enough to be faced with a defining moment. At such a moment, our actions may be cowardly (we may refuse the call) or brave, or simply inevitable. Not being one from whom the universe tends to make such demands, I am drawn to stories of personal quests and causes—stories of people who, against logic and common sense, find themselves on a treacherous path merely because, at some fundamental level, they have no choice but to tread it. Neely Tucker found himself facing the inevitable on that day a starved baby tried to hold his hand.

Tucker has a lifetime’s experience of treading dangerous roads. A white boy from rural Mississippi, he didn’t exactly take the easy way out when he decided to fall in love with a black girl from Detroit. As a foreign correspondent for the Knight-Ridder news service, Tucker has spent the better part of his life in the world’s most lethal places. He has seen mutilated girls in Yugoslavia, bombed fragments of bodies in Afghanistan, ditches filled with the dead in countries consumed by civil war. Cynical and without faith in either God or the goodness of humankind, he admits that he is the last person likely to be moved by the plight of one sick infant girl surrounded by hundreds of others in an orphanage in Zimbabwe. 

Which makes the transformation he felt when little Chipo (the name means “Gift”) weakly grasped his finger something of a minor miracle.

Tucker’s professed devotion to his profession was already starting to sound a little hollow when he came to Zimbabwe. He suffered from periodic nightmares and bouts of depression—all the classic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.  So it was a cruel fate that landed Tucker and his wife, Vita, at ground zero of the AIDS epidemic on in Africa; a couple unable to have children, adrift in a country with one of the highest rates of orphaned children and infant mortality.

Perhaps because they knew they couldn’t save all the dying children in Zimbabwe, the Tuckers set their hearts on saving just one—Chipo. Against all odds and all advice, they decided to adopt the little girl who was not only starving to death slowly in an understaffed orphanage, but was, in all likelihood, HIV positive. 

Tucker and Vita already thought they knew something about impossible odds. They were, after all, an interracial couple with family and connections in both Detroit and Mississippi. But even this background of overcoming cultural hostility and racial prejudice did not prepare them for their ordeal.

Their decision—so simple on the surface, for who would say no to people who wished to save a child?—set them careening down a heart-breaking road filled with bureaucratic red tape, hostility and medical emergencies that tested the couple’s bond to the limit. The government purposefully lost their files, demanded obscure documents, lost those, demanded them again, and even accused the Tuckers of bribery. They found themselves battling corrupt officials, but also deep cultural prejudices against adoption from a country that was still largely tribal in its structure. At one point, certain that they were about to be evicted from the country without the proper documents to take Chipo with them, they even began preparing for a life on the run with an illegal child.   

They never once considered giving up. As the author said, with a finality that is inarguable, “if we didn’t take her, Chipo would have died. Giving up simply wasn’t an option.”

So no, the Tuckers didn’t save all the children dying in Zimbabwe. But they did save one. It was enough.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs . She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying number of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.