https://thenerddaily.com/review-olive-the-lionheart-by-brad-ricca/ All Things Nerdy Fri, 03 Jun 2022 17:36:58 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://thenerddaily.com/review-olive-the-lionheart-by-brad-ricca/#comment-3086 Fri, 03 Jun 2022 17:36:58 +0000 https://www.thenerddaily.com/?p=26268#comment-3086 Olive MacLeod was my great great aunt, and I knew her older sister, my great grandmother, who was very close to her and lived to a great age, well. It seems to me that Olive’s story has been tweaked for romantic effect. She must have known what had happened to Boyd Alexander before she travelled, because she brought a headstone for his grave with her, his murder had already been reported by the French authorities in what is now South Sudan, and his travelling companions had reported recovering his body and conveying it hundreds of miles to be buried near Lake Chad alongside his brother, who had died on Boyd Alexander’s celebrated previous expedition “From the Niger to the Nile”. Olive hadn’t been in love with him; she had turned down three proposals of marriage from him, which was the reason for his returning to Africa. She undertook the journey out of guilt that his death had been the indirect consequence of her refusal. On her way home in 1911, she met Charles Temple, a British official in Nigeria, and married him a year later.

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