I feel like I need to give this three different reviews. I thought this was going to be a five star book for the first half. In the second half, I was hoping it wouldn’t take some turns, but it did wind up taking those turns, so I figured that I’d just give it four stars. The weaknesses in the second half of the story didn’t detract too much from the first half enough to ding it too much. But then the author’s postscript really ruined it for me. I can maybe see going on a rant about “gatekeeping” and the story she wanted to tell if she’d written a book about an indigenous Mexican woman living in her community (a la American Dirt). But her book was about a white American ex-Pat woman who moved down to Mexico and the interactions that followed. Who exactly is gatekeeping that? What appropriation is involved? I’m surprised she commented about her editors not being sure about releasing the book, yet they were ok with her writing that post-script? It never occurred to me to gate-keep this book but I’ll tell you that, even as a white woman, I found the language and tone of that post-script itself to be offensive. How about taking out the gate-keeping crap and editing the post-script to say that since the story was about a white woman living in Mexico and she’s a white woman living part-time in Guatemala, she felt that this story was within her lived experiences and was also a story she wanted to tell. It’s not like she chose something outside of her wheelhouse in the first place, so cut out the defensive rant. It’s not doing this book any favors unless its sole audience is other angry white boomers.