Among the many challenges of growing up comes the moment when a young child faces going alone into a scary place. Tololwa Mollel’s new picture book, Kele’s Secret, presents such a moment with great sympathy and humour. Of course, his little Yoanes succeeds in overcoming his fear and is amply rewarded by a satisfying discovery.

Set in Tanzania, where Yoanes lives with his grandparents in a rural compound, Kele’s Secret would make a delightful pairing with Jan Andrews’ The Very Last First Time, which deals with a similar subject in the setting of the Canadian Arctic. Mollel, the award-winning author of The Orphan Boy and other fine picture books, is an Arusha Maasai who grew up on a Tanzanian coffee farm like the one in this story, and remembers how he, too, helped his grandparents with the chores. Universal in its theme of a child’s struggle with fear, Kele’s Secret also gives an intimate and knowledgeable picture of one particular place in modern Africa.

Yoanes’s task is to help his grandmother by finding the hens’ eggs, but the hens make that task difficult by laying their eggs in very strange places. With determination, Yoanes follows one secretive hen, Kele, around the farm and plantation, among exotic trees like the avocado, eucalyptus, and oreteti, until she enters a vine-covered shed that makes Yoanes think of monsters. When he finds his courage and enters the shed, Yoanes also finds Kele’s secret nest, full of eggs, which he and his grandmother can sell at the market. Yoanes’s story is told in the first person, with a sprinkling of words from his own language, which are explained in a glossary at the end.

Painted in Tanzania, Catherine Stock’s illustrations for the book splendidly convey the beauty and atmosphere of the setting. Simple, expressive pictures of Yoanes draw the young reader into his story, and gradually expand to more detailed and colourful scenes of rooms in the house, farmyard and plantation, and lively marketplace. Landscapes, clothing, posture, and gesture are observed with subtlety and skill, and her human figures are drawn with a tender humour apt for this story.