Review: "Living with Strangers" by Robin Rosenbluth

Living with Strangers by Robin Rosenbluth
Published October 2026 via She Writes Press
★★★★

Rosenbluth's childhood was happy and stable—until her mother died, and everything went downhill. But her childhood is only half the story here; the other half is the year in college that Rosenbluth spent in rural Kenya, teaching primary school and learning Swahili (and some of the local languages) and generally finding a kind of stability she didn't have growing up, despite cultural divides and the temporary nature of the placement.

I picked this up because I gravitate (and probably will always gravitate!) toward stories of people moving to other countries, and I'm especially fond of the more off-the-beaten-path stories; never mind Paris, give me a memoir about someone moving, for the short term or the long, to North Macedonia or Western Sahara or East Timor or South Africa (see what I did there?). I mean, give me the Paris book too, but it's a lot easier for me to get to Paris than it is to get to rural Kenya. It's worth noting that I'm always also a bit trepidatious about books where people from the Global North go off to somewhere in the Global South, especially when the experience was some time ago; there are just a lot of ways for that to go wrong, in the doing or in the writing.

Happily, Rosenbluth avoids those pitfalls. She went to Kenya in 1973 as part of a college program (she attended Friends World College, which I'd never heard of but which sounds fascinating; students spent their entire four years traveling and living in different places and learning about the world), but it sounds like even then she was aware of not just her White and American privilege but also of the...let's say the dangers of assuming that privilege means knowing more, and also the inherent problem of White people swanning in and thinking they can fix things. It's clear that she knew her role there was limited, and that in the long term (in the short term, for that matter) it would be better for a local to have her teaching position, and that she wasn't there to change anyone. It's a better book for the perspective. Also, I think, a better book for the fact that she kept extensive journals (a college requirement) during her travels; I assume she was able to draw on those to keep the memories feeling fresh and the stories feeling fleshed out even fifty years down the line.

The juxtaposition of Rosenbluth's time in Kenya against her childhood took some getting used to. This isn't a criticism, just a reflection of the fact that she really did go quite far afield of what she knew. I'll let most of the details stay in the book, but I will say that Rosenbluth was left, from a shockingly young age, to parent her even younger sister and generally take care of the household (while her father, having left to live with his girlfriend, occasionally dropped by to leave some paltry grocery money and to criticize her housekeeping skills). When somebody finally stepped in, Rosenbluth and her sister were sent to live first in a children's home and then with a foster family, the latter of whom provided material stability but not emotional support. (Just as some people should not be parents, some people should perhaps not be foster parents.) As Rosenbluth observes, this experience prepared her for living in other places...though I wish that kind of resilience and adaptability could be bottled, because I think it's the exception rather than the norm.

Altogether an engrossing read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.