The happy room Book

Palmer's story of three grown missionary kids confronting their past and their parents is at its best when telling their childhood stories of Africa and the missionary subculture in which they were raised. The story has trouble in the narrative present, in America, as the same children struggle with finding their own places in the world. Perhaps the story is not long enough to deal with this amount of complexity -- or perhaps we are not meeting the characters at the right point in their lives. Though the ending is not tidy, it does come cross as though the characters themselves believe that their problems, and their respective solutions, are simpler than they are. When reading this book, I found myself comparing it to The Last Year of the War, another work of fiction which describes the evangelical Christian subculture with more particular detail and depth.

Despite its flaws, though, this book's inside view of the missionary subculture is more accurate than the one given in, for example, The Poisonwood Bible. As a missionary kid myself, I know and recognize people like those in The Happy Room; I don't recognize the ones in Kingsolver's book, whom I suspect represent an outsider's projections.