Publishers Weekly
07/22/2019
Kois, a parenting podcaster and editor at Slate, believed that he, his wife, and two daughters “were doing being a family wrong” and tells of his radical step to rectify their situation. He decided they should spend 2017 living in new locations far from their Arlington, Va., home, spending three months in each location. The experiment’s results are varied and delightful to read about: their happy idyll in beautiful Wellington, New Zealand, is packed with friendly neighborhood barbecues and a rejection of American helicopter parenting. The Dutch in Delft, in the Netherlands, seem a cooler lot and obsessed with “normalcy,” though Kois—a serial enthusiast—is entranced by their social cohesion and bicycles. Bug-infested Samara, Costa Rica, is appealingly laid-back, though its roughness starts straining family ties. Back in the vaunted “Real America” of Trump-voting Hays in western Kansas, Kois is as intrigued by the close-knit religious town as he is with the locales abroad. He fills his narrative with both ironic, self-deprecating humor and earnest soul-searching (“A place never solves anything”) as he comes to the realization that “you can’t actually change your kids but your kids change nonetheless.” This “foolhardy jaunt” into experimental family life–hacking consistently pleases and surprises. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
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"Borrows a page from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love....this book is an antidote to the documentarian approach that now pervades much travel writing."—Monica Drake, New York Times Book Review
"This book shows how one family works, as a way of helping us all ask ourselves: How might (and ought) our own families best function? ... Discuss this book with people you care about, who also care about you. "—Los Angeles Times
"Kois is a self-aware, menschy, and amusing guide to this adventure, picking apart what you can leave behind, what you can pick up along the way, and what will follow you wherever you are."—Vogue
"A hilarious and honest book about how wherever you (and your kids) go, there you (and their screens) are."
—Real Simple
"An impressive body of research."—The New York Times
"An illuminating story of family connection in the digital age."—Entertainment Weekly
"Kois and his family actually take the dizzying leap to leave behind their lives for a year-a trek that takes them from New Zealand to Kansas-and the result is a unique book that every overstressed and anxious (meaning = every) parent should read."
—The Millions
"Kois, an editor at Slate, made a project of exploring what living in other cultures-in this case, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Kansas-could teach [his family] about becoming closer. The result is his heartwarming memoir."—The Washingtonian
"Might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero...nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist."—Kirkus
"In thishighly entertaining and wryly insightful book, Dan Kois shows how elastic the very concept of family is. As he recounts his family's encounters with four foreign cultures, he illuminates not only those other societies, but also our own. He argues persuasively that we have much to learn from divorcing ourselves from our own assumptions."—Andrew Solomon, author of Far and Away and Far From the Tree
Lots of people talk about pulling up stakes and traveling for a year. Dan Kois and his family actually did it. He's funny and honest about how it all turned out."—Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé and There Are No Grown-Ups
"This sometimes hair-raising adventure in family togetherness across many continents took courage even to attempt, and a lively sense of humor to describe. Kois has produced a delightful and eye-opening book about what it means to be a family in the modern world."—Ian Frazier, author of Family and Coyote V Acme
"Many parents will relate to the experiences in this book of trying to get your kids to do stuff. Dan gives us some hope that we can ask our kids to do hard things, to adapt to new challenges, and it can be good for everyone. Also, the book is wildly entertaining."—Emily Oster, author of Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool
"As many parents know, the key to making a family work is: Put in the time. Dan Kois and his wife took their two kids on the trip of a lifetime and learned what's great (and miserable) about how that time passes. The result is a funny, thoughtful, well-reported and inspiring guide for anyone hoping to create family adventures (and misadventures) of their own."—Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better
"How To Be a Family is a witty, surprising and compulsively readable book. You may find yourself planning a geographical cure of your own by the time you reach the end of it. But Kois is too thoughtful a writer to dwell only on the transformative possibilities of such a trip. Nothing is quite as his family imagined it would be and this leads the book into exhilarating, emotionally complex territory."—Jenny Offill, author of Department of Speculation
Kirkus Reviews
2019-07-28
Slate editor Kois (Facing Future, 2009, etc.) looks for a little quality time with the family, finding it in adventures and misadventures around the world.
"Above all," writes the author near the beginning, "our life as a family felt as though it were flying past in a blur of petty arguments, overworked days, exhausted nights, an inchoate longing for some kind of existence that made more sense." The answer: Uproot. Move. Go see what the rest of the world looks like while the kids are still young. Kois and his family embarked on a journey that took them from Northern Virginia to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Kansas, and back again in a whirlwind year. The book doesn't have much of a thesis, but its slightly melancholy ending might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero. There are a few set pieces and clichés but also some nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist. For example, the author writes about how in Holland, speed laws for motor vehicles are set at 30 kilometers per hour because anything more would likely doom a pedestrian or cyclist to death. So it is that people survive such collisions in Holland, which puts a nation assured of good odds on two wheels, which, thus applied to children, "helps create the kind of independence that Dutch parents prize." The America of red-state Kansas proved more fearful but not without civic virtues; refreshingly, Kois doesn't hammer too hard on politics even though it's clear where his views lie. Overall, the book is a minor contribution to the literature of family (and travel, for that matter), but it's a pleasant narrative that makes few demands on readers.
Slack moments aside, this memoir of travel with a family in need of change has its pleasures.
