So this just goes to show how far behind I am in my book blogging. I actually read Foreign Correspondence,  a memoir by Geraldine Brooks, on the plane home from visiting friends in Virginia over the Memorial Day weekend.

I first discovered this book when I was browsing through Geraldine Brooks’ website for discussion material for People of the Book, a recent book club selection. What attracted me to the book (beyond my increasing ardour for anything written by her) was that the book tells the story of Brooks’ childhood pen pal friendships and her quest to find them years later. It will likely come as no surprise that I had several pen pals over the course of my childhood and teenage years. It started with the publication of a request for boys and girls to write me in the pen pals section of The Newfoundland Herald. In fact, I still have a cutting of that request, which states:

My name is Lesley. I am ten years old and in grade five. My hobbies are reading, collecting stickers, listening to music and watching TV. I would like for penpals from the ages of 9-12 to write to me.

I’m sure I had some people respond but I don’t recall who or how long we wrote to one another, so obviously it wasn’t an overly successful venture. My next foray into corresponding with strangers was a serendipitous conversation with a bunkmate at summer camp when I was 12. She had an International Youth Service form, which allowed a person to request the country, age and gender of a pen pal (or penfriend as IYS referred to them) for a nominal fee. This of course appealed to me immensely, and I filled out the form and eagerly awaited a response. Of those initial and tentative friendships, I am pleased to say that I am friends with one to this day, my dear Giuseppe from Catania in Sicily, who has known me longer than anyone outside my family. We met a few years back, and handwritten letters have now been replaced with periodic e-mails and Facebook updates (although I have to say, I do miss seeing the personally addressed and postmarked letters showing up in my mailbox – but such is life in modern times) and we have even met in person when he visited the United States a few years back. At one time I had dozens of penfriends from all over the world, but now all that’s left of those are some postcards and photos packed away in a box and of course, all my good memories associated with them and their letters. Sadly, IYS has also gone the way of the handwritten letter, and a visit to their website a year or so ago revealed that the organization, which began in 1952, had decided to cease operations on June 30, 2009.  Now you can only access the site via web archives.

So it was with all these personal connections and memories that I read Foreign Correspondence. And absolutely loved it. Brooks relates growing up as an introspective child in Australian suburbia, one who longed to experience a more exotic and exciting life than the one she supposedly led. She wrote to pen pals (mostly also found through IYS) who opened up the world for her beyond walls of her home and what she saw every day. There was Joanie from New Jersey, two boys – one a Christian Arab and another a Jew – from Israel, and Janine from the French countryside.

But Foreign Correspondence isn’t just a nostalgic look back at friendships forged through letters; Brooks gives us a fascinating and rich look at her childhood, her family, and what led her from a small-town life to the life of an international news correspondent, as well as the changing dynamics of Australian culture. As someone who grew up in another part of the British Commonwealth, I could relate to the feelings of cultural inadequacy and indentity. As a girl who dreamed of traveling to far off lands and wished for a life less ordinary, I saw my childhood echoed in hers.

Foreign Correspondence may be the second Geraldine Brooks book that makes it to my list of top favorites for this year. She writes with the innate gifts of a born storyteller, a tale that is humorous, evocative and irresistible.

By the way, the title of this post comes from Foreign Lands, one of my favorite children’s poems, from A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.

I saw the next-door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky’s blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the roads on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.