In this critical coming-of-age story, the author describes the everyday lives of her family and other political refugees, tallying their cultural misunderstandings and unspooling the costs of starting over.Highly attuned to her parents’ sacrifices and the ways in which these make her different from her peers, the author charts her family’s gradual socio-economic rise, as well as her own rise as an educated intellectual in a culture foreign to the one she was born to. This autobiographical debut novel was a runaway success in Quebec, making Dawson a household name.Too young to grasp the political motivations propelling her parents’ decision to flee Pinochet’s Chile, seven-year-old Caroline describes the only world she’s known until then: the way her family’s house shook with every earthquake yet resisted, able to move, instead, with the earth itself, the way the ocean’s winds slipped into their home even when its windows were shut, how she played with kites made from old newspapers, the Andes dust.
In this critical coming-of-age story, the author describes the everyday lives of her family and other political refugees, tallying their cultural misunderstandings and unspooling the costs of starting over.Highly attuned to her parents’ sacrifices and the ways in which these make her different from her peers, the author charts her family’s gradual socio-economic rise, as well as her own rise as an educated intellectual in a culture foreign to the one she was born to. This autobiographical debut novel was a runaway success in Quebec, making Dawson a household name.Too young to grasp the political motivations propelling her parents’ decision to flee Pinochet’s Chile, seven-year-old Caroline describes the only world she’s known until then: the way her family’s house shook with every earthquake yet resisted, able to move, instead, with the earth itself, the way the ocean’s winds slipped into their home even when its windows were shut, how she played with kites made from old newspapers, the Andes dust.