‘Captivating’
‘Transparent and honest’
‘A really unique voice’
‘Wonderful personal story’
‘Loved it’
‘Funny and inspiring’
‘The perfect summer read’
‘There, sharing the plane with twenty other passengers, it hit me; I was really doing it.
Was I crazy? I didn’t know what to expect. I was leaving my comfort zone, leaving my comfortable, trouble-free and sheltered life behind and into something totally different.
What did I know about the real world? For the first time I was scared and I doubted whether I had made the right decision leaving everything behind and going away for a year, a whole year!”
In a nutshell!
Lucía is a Spanish teenager going as an exchange student to Pennsylvania. She is seventeen but she could just as well be thirteen, naïve as she is. Lucía has watched too many teen movies that have filled her head with unrealistic expectations, a great way to start…
It is the year 1999 when she embarks on a never ending trip to her final destination, the small Allentown airport. On one of the many flights she takes to get there it hits her, is she crazy? She is going to be living with people she has never met before for a year, a whole year! She doesn’t even know how to do her laundry, for crying out loud...
To make things worse she has just realised she can barely speak English, the language she has been studying since she was nine. What she doesn't know is that she has embarked in the journey of a lifetime.
She is going to meet the most amazing people and fall desperately in love. As events unfold, Lucía learns everything about expectations, insecurities, self-preservation, heartbreak, growing up and that thing called love.
The twenty year reunion!
I have gone back to visit my American family many times since that amazing year I lived with them. But I have to say that one of the most special visits was the one I made twenty years after the naïve seventeen-year-old me arrived in Exeter to spend a year with some people she had never met, who then became her second family!
This picture was taken on that trip, I LOVE it. The boys are Emmett, Sue’s son and Pablo, my son, they are both the same age and get along great!
I don’t know how to describe the feeling I get when I see my children playing with Sue’s children. It is a like my year there was just the beginning of something very special and that there are still many happy moments to come!