Book Reviews, Children’s fiction

Piet Prins' Wambu trilogy

Wambu: the Chieftain's Son Wambu: In the Valley of Death Wambu: Journey to Manhood by Piet Prins 2025 / each 350-ish pages Cannibals, crocodiles, evil witch doctors, and a small boy who has to contend with them all, and all on his own? Yup, this is the story of Wambu, a boy of 8 or so who lives with his tribe of cannibals in the deep jungles of New Guinea back before the white man yet dared venture there. Wambu's tribe is a small one and they haven’t been able to eat any people for quite some time now so, when Wambu and his father come across a strange girl wandering through their part of the forest, their first inclination is to have her for dinner... as the main entree. Fortunately they have second thoughts and instead adopt the girl, Sirja, into their family. And that's when things get really interesting because Sirja is a recent Christian convert. And her newfound faith in the Lord is sharply contrasted with the village’s reliance on pagan gods. Though Wambu likes listening to Sirja’s stories about Moses and Abraham and Jesus, he also likes going hunting with his father and learning about all the evil spirits in the forest. Sirja tells him that the white missionaries are wonderful, but the village’s witch doctor insists that white men are evil spirits who have taken on flesh. Who is Wambu to believe? When Wambu’s village is attacked by a rival headhunting tribe he escapes and goes for help…to the white man! This is quite the adventure, and quite the education too, with loads of interesting information about what it’s like to live in the jungle. Kids will learn that some people find caterpillars delicious, and that they eat the insides of trees too. Tidbits like this are thrown in throughout the book and make the story all the more intriguing as we are taken into the depths of a very foreign world. But what makes this book exceptional is the very real way that Wambu encounters God. There's no preachiness, and nothing saccharine about it – Wambu is on his own up against insurmountable odds, and he needs help from God. But who is this Jesus that Sirja was talking about, and how is He different from all the other spirits Wambu has been taught about? It's a boy asking real and desperate questions, and God showing this boy how to find out more about Him. Cautions The Chieftain’s Son is about a cruel cannibal culture, so people die, including the near entirety of Wambu's tribe. That might make this seem too grim a story for a tween audience. And for many a tween it may be. But the massacre is given in sparse detail – Piet Prins was trying to teach children that darkness exists, but only so he could highlight how God defeats it. My main nit to pick is that book one doesn’t have a proper conclusion because it is the first of three, and the story is incomplete without the other two. So you’ll want to order them all at the same time, because once your son starts reading he won’t want to have to wait for the other books to arrive. Conclusion Author Piet Prins is best known for his World War Two-era Scout series about a boy and his loyal German Shepherd, but his Wambu trilogy is better still. This first book in this classic series was published in Dutch back in 1961, and then published by Paideia Press in English in 1981. Now operating as an imprint of the Cantaro Institute, Paideia Press has given the whole series a polish, reissuing them as shorter but chunkier 300-page books, with brilliant new covers you can see at the top of this article. The older covers were good too (see below) but the update is exciting – we do judge books by their covers, and my hope is these new covers will have kids giving this series the look it deserves. I'm grateful for the new covers because I think this is an absolutely remarkable series for being a page-turner and real in a way that no non-christian book can be. What it teaches the reader about God – about His power, mercy, love, and sovereignty over every square inch of the world (and that includes even the densest corners of the darkest jungle) – is really real. How many Christian books manage that? With that said, I'll also note this has proven more hit and miss than I would have expected. Normally I can predict what'll be a hit with my kids, and with kids in general. But I tried this with my girls at just nine or ten because that's roughly when I read and absolutely loved them. It sure wasn't a good bedtime read for them then, no matter their dad's enthusiasm (which, with most other books, would have been enough to carry them along). Maybe there was a bit of a boy/girl difference going on there, but it might also be that today's preteen books are generally tamer, "safer" fare, so one cannibal tribe wiping out another would come as a most unexpected shock. So I'm pitching this to my youngest again, now at 12, and hoping she'll love them as much as I enjoyed re-reading them again this year.