A review by wanderthroughthepages
Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean by Kate Montgomery, Hilary Liftin

5.0

Dear Exile was, simply put, a revealing collection of letters between two young women. Kate, struggling to live in Kenya while serving with the Peace Corps with her husband, had to battle things generally perceived as some of the worst injustices in the world: beating children for not scoring well on a test they weren't prepared for by their teachers, terrible sanitation in all ways possible, lack of decent food available to those surrounding them, and, possibly worst of all, the refusal to even try to do anything by those seen as authority figures. At the same time, Hilary struggles with finding her life in NYC - dating, bad neighbors, and getting a job she can go to every day without dreading at least one aspect of it.

Through all of their struggles, I found their separate but parallel storylines to be intriguing, funny, interesting, disgusting, and whole-heartedly too strange to be fiction. I loved this book and reading about the good and the bad of the life of then-PCV Kate Montgomery, especially as someone who is interested in applying for the Peace Corps at some point in the not-that-distant future.