CIRCLING HOME

In Repak’s memoir, an American woman details years spent in a variety of countries with her peripatetic family.

The Maryland-reared author left her home country for West Africa’s Ivory Coast in the early 1990s. At the time, she and her husband, Stefan, who was working on an AIDS project for the CDC, had a 4-year-old son (Aaron) and a 1-year-old daughter (Elena). Adjusting to their new life was a challenge, as heightened “political tensions” in their city of Abidjan made even excursions to the marketplace nerve-racking experiences. But Repak and her family proved resilient, persistently adapting as Stefan’s CDC jobs moved the clan back to the United States and to such places as Tanzania and Geneva. They befriended expats and locals, learned different languages, and immersed themselves in new cultures; for them, home was a forever “evolving” notion. The author excels at showcasing the places where she’s lived; the Ivory Coast, for example, despite its unrest, offered an amiable populace and a quieter way of life that an introvert like Repak could appreciate (much of her narrative lingers in this country, where her family lived for six years). She discusses extended family as well, including her parents and siblings, who endured their own ordeals in the United States. The latter half of the memoir relays various trips with family and friends that, while sublimely described, aren’t quite as absorbing as accounts of Stefan’s work with HIV-infected individuals, a crucial element of the book. Nevertheless, Repak consistently transforms simple observations into lyrical images: “It was crisp and clear that night at zero degrees centigrade with a billion stars speckling the sky… [we were] tiptoeing across the highest mountain on the continent in the inky dark.”

A fascinating true story that evinces the value of family and the beauty of the world.