For as long as she can remember, Aisholpan, a sports-loving Kazakh girl, has wanted to hunt with eagles the way her brother, father, and grandfather did. Her memoir describes her family's nomadic life surrounded by animals and the Kazakh culture that Aisholpan loves. When her brother leaves home to serve his mandatory time in the army, Aisholpan cares for his golden eagle and assists her father when tourists come to stay in their home to experience eagle hunting. Among these tourists is a British filmmaker who is intrigued by Aisholpan's competence with the eagles and who wants to make a documentary about her training to become an eagle huntress. The filmmaker captures Aisholpan being lowered into a cliff-side eagle's nest to steal an eaglet and her subsequent training of the bird to respond to her voice and hunt on command without destroying the pelt of its prey. The film crew is also there when Aisholpan wins the Golden Eagle Festival, an elite competition to determine the best eagle hunter in Mongolia. She is the first female and, at age 13, the youngest person ever to win the prize. Young readers will be intrigued by the details of eagle hunting and the nomadic lifestyle and will empathize with how alien Western culture seems to Aisholpan when the film makes her famous abroad. This is an accessibly written, steadily paced story of perseverance and self-confidence.
The Eagle Huntress
The True Story of the Girl Who Soared Beyond Expectations
The teenaged subject of the award-winning documentary The Eagle Huntress tells her story of becoming the first female eagle hunter to take part in a highly competitive festival.
Aisholpan Nurgaiv, the subject of the award-winning documentary The Eagle Huntress, tells her own story for the first time, speaking directly with writer Liz Welch (I Will Always Write Back), who traveled to Mongolia for this book. Her story and fresh, sincere voice are not only inspiring but truly magnificent: with the support of her father, she captured and trained her own golden eagle and won the Ölgii eagle festival. She was the only girl to compete in the festival.
Her triumphant story hits on multiple key nonfiction points of appeal: stories of survival, of unique animal-human bonds, and of girls accomplishing amazing things. One of the consistent highest-achieving trends in middle-grade nonfiction continues to be empowering stories about strong girls accomplishing tasks that had previously been considered impossible. Not only does Aisholpan's story deliver that sensation in spades, but it comes with strong media ties from the 2016 documentary about her and her achievements.