An American teenager in Slovakia

Many of us have vivid memories of high school, when we were figuring out who we are, trying out various versions of ourselves, and figuring out how the adult world works. Some of us kept journals or diaries of those days as we fell in and out of love, reconsidered our religious beliefs, and tried to make sense of what was happening. Few of us go back to those journals and transform them into a book, as Sarah Hinlicky Wilson has done.

Wilson offers here a glimpse into one year of her life as a teenager. She finished high school in upstate New York a year early so she could move overseas with her family. Her father, Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky, is of Slovak heritage, and he had been invited to teach at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Bratislava. The Hinlicky family moved to Slovakia a year after its peaceful split with the Czech Republic, known as the Velvet Divorce. Paul and his wife, Ellen, stayed there for six years.

Wilson stayed for just one year, which she writes about in month-by-month chapters. She reconstructs the year largely from written sources, including her journal from her first month in Slovakia, 27 letters she wrote to her high school friend Colleen, and a set of letters her parents wrote to their parents. Much of the book is written in the breathless prose of a teenager, but from time to time she turns a mirror on her teenage self, reflecting as an adult on the process of her self-discovery.