A comprehensive guide to the homestay experience, brimming with honesty, compassion, and plenty of easy-to-follow strategies.
A homestay expert explores the pros and cons of opening one’s home to international students.
The homestay program—in which students from around the world temporarily live with a family in another country—sees thousands of participants every year, and Wilson shares the work it takes to be a successful host parent. Personal stories from various homestay families, highlighting the meaningful connections that can develop between all those involved, are interspersed with practical tips that can help make the stay a successful one. Tips include being aware of physical cultural differences (e.g., eye contact is considered rude in some cultures), as well as more pragmatic distinctions (toilet paper is thrown in the trash instead of flushed in many Asian and Southern European countries). Wilson also addresses the emotional work that it takes to be a successful host, such as choosing “willful awareness”—a type of self-reflection that includes “staying with hard topics, listening when you’d rather leave, looking toward rather than away, and acknowledging your role in the system that keeps people marginalized: this is where the learning happens” (here, Wilson paraphrases the work of psychologist Dolly Chugh, whom she quotes throughout). Blending real stories with relevant suggestions make this book a fascinating read, despite some points not quite landing. For example, a German student whose host mother became angry when the student stayed out late without calling explains that she’s used to having freedom at home. Wilson mentions that “living with an adult who cared about her well-being” was a “new experience” for this girl—indicating that having more lax rules in Germany means her parents weren’t caring, as opposed to it being a cultural difference. This is a rare slip, however. Overall, Wilson’s practical handbook contains everything a potential host family might need, while also celebrating the joy that comes with welcoming strangers into one’s home.
A comprehensive guide to the homestay experience, brimming with honesty, compassion, and plenty of easy-to-follow strategies.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781774584989
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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