Enchanting teens with science and ecology adventures

DID you know South Africa has a Tracker Academy, a training division of the SA College for Tourism? Unemployed people are trained in traditional animal tracking skills for employment in the conservation industry. The main aim is to restore indigenous knowledge in Africa. In his preface, Alex van den Heever says very few skilled trackers remain in Africa and skills are disappearing fast. The three authors have years of tracking experience, much of it in the Kruger National Park, and they can recognise not only what sort of animal they are tracking, but whether it’s male or female. This field guide is packed with pictures and information on spoor, animal habits, diet, droppings and territorial behaviour. IT’S hardly surprising a combination of a pathologist in private practice who is also an extraordinary professor in medical microbiology at Stellenbosch University should produce a teen novel as spectacular as

But then Dr Elizabeth Wasserman is pretty spectacular herself, as her earlier Dogtective series of teen books testify.

The trilogy was first published in Afrikaans and received the prestigious Alba Bouwer award from the Academy for Arts and Sciences in 2013; the first book is prescribed for Grade 6.

With hints of Jules Verne, Ian Fleming

The Adventures of Anna

and Cousteau, an intimate knowledge of all things medical and a use of language which adroitly takes care neither to patronise nor bamboozle readers with scientific jargon, Wasserman has a winner. This exciting novel is, I hope the first of many more in an English series.

Wasserman, who was born in Klerksdorp in 1964 and grew up in tiny Koppies in the Free State, wanted to write from an early age. She studied medicine at the University of the Free State, then specialised in medical microbiology at Stellenbosch. Now she lives with her husband and daughter, plus spaniel Dogtective William himself, in Cape Town’s northern suburbs.

Her scientific background shows as she writes of a world that is interlinked, and how we need to treat the ecosystem and each other with care and respect.

Wasserman believes learning should be fun and regards science as the most powerful form of magic.

transports one to an Indian Ocean island just below the equator. There (Bond would smile) the Atom family: Professor Sabatina Atom, a scientist working for United Surveillance, her tomboy daughter Anna, and Anna’s strange little brother Pip, half-human, half-biotron, do their things.

The father, Admiral Atom, is confined to a Space Ark where he looks after earth’s most endangered animals. Like her father, Anna possess super-strength, invulnerability, super-leaping skills and an ability to run at 160km/h.

What’s not to love!