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Days Like Floating Water by Susan Edwards McKee Oak Leaf Impressions Press
book review by J. Alpha
"Do I want to plunge into a new experience just to prove I can still do it? Or to put a more positive spin on it, can I feel worthwhile, useful and serve in a unique way so my experience can help people I’ve never even met?"
Days Like Floating Water will rev the engines of readers—young and old—in this wonderfully well-written story of Susan McKee's, and her husband Robert's year and one half long journey to a rural college in Chuga China to teach English to wary Chinese students.
Part Memoir, part candid travel journal, the poignant and often witty narrative in Days Like Floating Water allows Susan and Robert's story to unfold before the readers' eyes, as the action and pacing of the portrayal of their journey intimately exposes their fears and opinions of the primitive village life of the Chinese people they lived among.
While they could have been living a comfortable retirement with family and friends, Susan and Robert were serving on a Mormon humanitarian mission, where the communist culture of China and the shadows of the massacre at Tiananmen Square become more than just a footnote in history books, or television broadcasts. It became a part of their daily lives.
"Our 'sons and daughters in China' are moving on like floating water with rich, full lives. Our own lives have been deeply enriched by knowing them," and readers will be enriched by getting to know the McKee's as they read this account of their journey through their primitive "day-to-day" life among the people of a remote Chinese village.
With its vivid description, honest emotion, conflict, and a clear theme and purpose, Susan McKee has created an excellent example of the power of finely crafted personal experience writing.