by Robert Sedlack

"The African Safari Papers is an intense and outrageous portrait of a family so troubled that their family trNP is, in a word, torture. Richard Clark, the narrator of this sharp and funny novel, is nineteen years old, a drug-addicted, foul-mouthed, sex-crazed young man who is off to Africa on a safari with his parents. Obviously, this is a mistake of considerable magnitude. Juxtaposed with the hostile environment, the already tense situation becomes explosive: Mom is going insane, Dad drinks and ticks off animal sightings on his checklist, and Richard is busy getting high on the drugs he has smuggled in his mother's suitcase. Anything can happen, and it does, in this "Catcher in the Rye for the twenty-first century.