Natalie Elise Taylor
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:31 PDT

River of Fear is a literary nonfiction memoir in which the author, Natalie Taylor, leaves the only home she's ever known in small town east Texas to move to Sabie, South Africa with her parents for her father's new position as COO of a wood products company. Taylor and her parents find home in a house with a tin roof, looking out on hazy green mountains and a carefully groomed garden. In Sabie, Taylor discovers a world that challenges her ideas about safety, control, and fear. The Sabie River overflows with crocodiles, while at school, as the only American, Taylor quietly struggles to find her place in her classmates' insulated world. At home on the banks of the "river of fear," she strives to find herself in a place where AIDS, racism, poverty, and forest fires encroach on paradise, and where her parents each cope with fear in their own way. River of Fear is Taylor's coming-of-age memoir in post-apartheid South Africa in which Taylor attempts to make sense of her relationship to the world, her parents, and herself.