3 out of 4 stars
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Dear Thailand, by Diane de Simone, is a story written in first person narration of the authors own personal experience living in Thailand. She begins her tale by describing the experience she had during a trip there explaining how different the lifestyle of the people there is compared to America’s westernized lifestyle. She also tells how she begins to declutter her own life in preparation to move there. In the midst of preparation she also explains how involved she is in her fathers life and the sadness that begins to set in for both of them while he resides in an assisted living center. She describes his slow decent into madness and how it affects her until she decides to take him with her to Thailand. Once they have both relocated a change begins to occur in both of them. They are living in a simple and experiencing new things. They meet new people who teach them a variety of lessons. After her father passes away she is faced with living there alone and also discovering who she truly is. The author continues on to learn and share more about the culture while also finding herself and goes on to share what she has learned.
I really like how open the author was about all her experiences. I enjoyed reading about her view of the things that occurred there and also her view of how different western culture is from Thailand culture. It gave me the desire to experience it for myself and leave our hectic world behind. I also really enjoyed her tid bits of the language and her translations. It helped me feel like I was experiencing her life as the story went on.
Something I did not like about the book is that it became difficult to stay focused on the storyline after the loss of her father. The story had a climax and then went on with less climatic events. I also noticed a few grammatical errors.
After reading this book I would have to give the book a rating of 3 out of 4 stars. I am giving it this rating because there were a few errors and the story line was difficult to stay focused on after the main climax. I would recommend this book to others since I enjoyed it myself and it gave me the drive to want to go and visit Thailand myself. I do not feel that the book qualifies to be rated as a 2 out of 4 or lower because the author did not have more than 10 errors which places a book in the 2 category by my grading scale and it had a great story line that was easy to follow for most of the book.
I think this book would be most appealing to young adults and up. I say this because of some of the vocabulary used and also some of the experiences would be difficult to fully understand for those at a younger age.
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Dear Thailand
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