Judy Stanton: The book has an interesting premise: the author finds letters to her old "pen pals" from when she was a teenager, and seeks to find them and learn about their lives some 20 - 25 years later. It was not my favorite Geraldine Brooks book, but very readable nonetheless. I found myself wondering how the pen pals might perceive what she wrote about them. A foreign correspondent, Brooks has travelled the world, so it's interesting to see her perspective on the various roads her pen pals' lives have taken.