Marion Knell

I am a missionary who has travelled extensively and have lived overseas for over 10 years now. I have a family of my own with two small children as well as work with 5 other families who also have children of various ages and one being an interracial/intercultural marriage. I bought this book as I thought it might be good for our resource library. After reading it I advise you to pass on this one and look for something better -- more well-written, more complete, more helpful.

Overall, I found it to be poorly organized and written -- I had to force myself to finish it. It makes a lot of over-generalizations about 3rd-culture families and their experiences. Many of the specific examples given seem to be a forced fit to the point the author is trying to make. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the book is the author's constant question-asking -- questions to which answers are not given. Granted the questions could be useful if someone wishes to use them as a guideline and do some investigation in order to find answers. However, I imagine most people who would buy this book would do so because they were facing a move overseas and would prefer a book that answered more of the questions in its own text. In fact, they'd probably buy this book because they already have the same questions the author posits. Therefore the author's method would prove to be redundant for them at best...serve to reinforce their fears of the unknown at worst (i.e., if even this 'expert' doesn't know the answers to these questions...).

Overall, it seems that this is a person with some experience in the subject matter who just decided to sit down one day and begin to whip out a book based on the questions that occurred to her as she wrote. Do yourself a favor and find a more thorough book that employs some good investigative journalism to back up its information and actually answers some of those questions.… (altro)