A Young-Adult Novel about Mourning, Coming of Age, and putting a stop to the Poaching of Elephants.
‘No Entry,’ by Canadian author Gila Green
I hadn’t heard of the field of Eco-Fiction and don’t read many books geared for young adults, but one afternoon in the early days of the pandemic, I read Gila Green’s young adult novel, No Entry.
No Entry is the first in an environmental series focused on elephant poaching and the international trade that leads to their illegal slaughter. It’s heartbreaking — some of the internet pictures I looked at were so horrendous that I wondered about the future of civilization.
Green tells the story through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old girl. Yael Amar is in South Africa, signed up for a summer course in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. A rising senior, she plans to later join her parents in Johannesburg, where her father will spend his sabbatical year. Yael’s parents had originally emigrated to Canada from South Africa years before and have returned because of the tragic death of her younger brother.
Yael is also in mourning. She plunges herself into the work and gets busy learning everything from medic training to driving on the left side of the road. Then, she sees her first dead elephant. Things start going wrong and she doesn’t know who to trust, because the adults don’t step up when she expresses concern.
It’s a quick read, but it reminded me of being that age, feeling like my every action mattered and filled with intense emotions about my place in the world. I think I’ll pick up a young adult novel every once in a while, just to recall that super-charged time of life. Seventeen is when many of us discover that sometimes even the best humans are flawed.
I interviewed the author for the New Books Network.
There’s a reason I’m thinking about that book now. Today I read that because of the intervention of an animal protection NGO, a high court in South Africa temporarily stopped hunting quotas for 10 leopards, 10 black rhinos, and 150 elephants.
The key word here is “temporarily.” To be clear, until the plan was halted, these supposedly protected animals were to be hunted and killed by wealthy people for the purpose of transporting their trophies across the globe. Why is that still happening in 2022? What kind of people admire these trophies, and can they all be shipped to an island somewhere, with no connection to the rest of civilized society?
Time for the next book in your eco-fiction series, Gila Green!
