Overview
Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds is a memoir by German author Sabine Kuegler. It was first published in Germany in 2005 as Dschungelkind, with the English version released the same year and the US edition in 2007. In 1980, when Sabine was seven, she moved with her parents, who were linguists and missionaries, to a remote river settlement in West Papua, Indonesia. They went there to live among the Fayu, a tribe of about four hundred people who had only recently come into contact with outsiders. The book tells the story of the ten years she spent growing up in the rainforest and the confusion she felt when, at seventeen, she left for boarding school in Switzerland.
Book Review
In the second part of the book, a seventeen-year-old girl stands by a Swiss road, unable to cross because the cars are too fast, too many, and too loud. This is the same girl who once swam in crocodile-filled rivers, hunted with a bow, and knew which snakes to avoid and which grubs to eat. Yet here, she is overwhelmed by traffic. The real twist is that she sees the jungle as home and Europe as the wild, and this idea is what drives Child of the Jungle.
When Sabine Kuegler was seven, her parents, who were linguists studying an unwritten language, moved the family to live with the Fayu in West Papua. The tribe had only recently been contacted, and the Kueglers were the first outsiders to live with them. What follows is a childhood very different from most, and Kuegler never exaggerates her experiences. She chews dried bat wing like other children chew gum. She learns archery from Fayu boys. She observes a culture where revenge killing is not rare but part of daily life, and she describes it with the calm, clear perspective of a child who sees it as ordinary.
The book’s main strength is its childlike clarity. Kuegler writes in short, simple sentences. At first, I thought this made the book weaker, but I later realized it was intentional. She doesn’t describe the jungle as an outsider. Instead, she writes from the perspective of a child who grew up there. Some memoirists try to sound poetic, which can feel like an adult correcting the child’s story. Kuegler avoids this. She keeps her writing at the child’s level, which makes her story believable.
I spend much of my life waiting quietly in the forests of Sweden, so I noticed something in her descriptions of learning to read a landscape. She shows that sounds have meaning, certain movements matter, and the river changes from one day to the next. This kind of attention isn’t magical; it comes from experience. It seems ordinary until the moment it becomes useful. Kuegler had learned this by age ten. Most of us spend our adult lives trying to gain even a little of that skill.
But the real focus of the book isn’t adventure, it’s grief. The person closest to Kuegler is Ohri, a Fayu boy who becomes like a brother to her. His death from tuberculosis, an illness brought from outside, is the turning point in the story. The book lets you notice this without making it dramatic. Only after Ohri’s death does she decide to leave. The Swiss sections that follow are some of the most unusual descriptions of culture shock I’ve read, because the shock goes in the opposite direction. Escalators frighten her. Small talk feels like a ritual she can’t understand. Money makes no sense to someone raised in a sharing culture. She says she learned fear in Europe, not in the jungle.
My main reservation is about the book’s structure. The European sections are much shorter, while the jungle gets the longer, more detailed middle part. The harder, more personal part of the story, rebuilding yourself when your old world is far away, gets fewer pages. I understand why, since the jungle is what the book highlights. Still, the real theme is displacement, and I would have traded one crocodile story for twenty more pages about Switzerland.
The book also raises a question it doesn’t fully explore: even though her family was loving, their presence was part of the long process that changed the Fayu forever. Kuegler mentions this (the title’s ‘two worlds’ has a double meaning) but since she was a child, the story stays in the child’s perspective. When the book became a bestseller in Germany, some readers thought this was evasive. I found the book honest about its limits, but I would have liked more of the adult’s reflection.
What stays with me most is a sense of homesickness. Kuegler misses a place that, as she knew it, no longer exists. Not because it was destroyed, but because of contact, time, and her leaving. This is a special kind of loss: not losing a place, but losing a version of the world. Anyone who has changed countries, careers, or even their sense of self will know what I mean. I do.
Sabine Kuegler (b. 1972 in Patan, Nepal) is a German author. Dschungelkind spent months on the German bestseller lists and was adapted into a feature film in 2011; her sequel, Ruf des Dschungels (Call of the Jungle), appeared in 2006.
Translator Note
The English edition was translated by Christian Kuegler, the author’s brother, who grew up among the Fayu alongside her, a rare case of a translator who lived the story he was translating.
Related Posts
- Mom and Boys in the Jungle (Sabine’s sister went back to West Papua to introduce her children to the Fayu.)
To read more book reviews, click here.
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