This is a very hard book to review. I always have difficulty giving honest feedback when an independent author releases a memoir and I want to make it perfectly clear that I think Liam Klenk has a fascinating life story and I wanted keep reading to find out what happened next in his life. However, the way the book was written made it very hard for me to try to follow his timeline. He writes as if he is speaking to someone in stream of consciousness and as a reader it is so hard to keep up with random thoughts thrown in the middle of a situation. I also found the way that he structured his stories to be a bit confusing. For example, he talks about his decision to marry his father’s lover “to help two people he deeply cared about.” But, two pages later he talks about how his dad has been deceived by his lover and was used only to obtain citizenship. Since he is writing this with the benefit of hindsight I think it would be much less distracting to just keep the emotional whiplash out of the conversation. I think the book is MUCH too long, and many, many unnecessary paragraphs could have been tightened up by just simplify the story.
As a side note - the author and I are almost exactly the same age. When I was 19 I spent a summer running some camps in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State. Reading about his expectations of the region and his disappointment at discovering a high altitude desert mirrored my experience as well and it brought me back to that fun time in my life.