I thought this was a fantastic novel. It's the first time I read a novel with many different authors and different stories. That's that I found the most amusing. The stories were absolutly wonderful. Some I found were a little sad. Some even made me laugh.It was a great novel, due to the fact that I am bilingual as well. My mother tongue is french. With this novel it makes you see what kind of events people go through their lives. I could see from the different stories that it was hard to introduce their children into different cultures compared to what they are used to.Thank you very much Suzanne for the novel. It will always be an experience I will remember. ( )

Okay, disclaimer: my essay "The View from the Outside" is in this anthology. My essay talks about raising my biracial kids, who are half-Indian, in the US.

I just finished reading the entire anthology, and wanted to pass on that it holds a wide range of experiences from around the globe. Living in different cultures, trying to hold onto or understand traditions, and the all time universal of a mother's love are all explored.

I especially recommend this anthology for anyone raising their own multi-culti kids, wherever they live. Warm and witty and wise. ( )

Charming compilation of short stories of raising kids in assorted cross-cultural environments. Quality of stories varies a bit, but overall something here for everyone willing to expand their horizons a bit. Disclaimer: I am not a mother, but I did raise two kids in Asia. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this book. One reason for this is that it landed on our doorstep at exactly the right time. We have recently moved, within the same country, to an area with a very different ethnic mix. Our daughter has gone from being in the majority ethnic group to being the only girl in her class with her ethnic heritage. The transition has not always been smooth. However, the main reason for enjoying it is that it is so well written. Rarely have I read a collection of essays where the quality of the writing has been so consistently high, retaining a wide variety of styles, perspectives and distinctiveness of voices. The contributors write with warmth, vulnerability and insight about the challenges, painfulness, and joys of being raised in a mix of cultures.

How do you feel as an Indian women, who has spent her whole life fighting racist abuse in a white majority culture, but who still loves her dark brown skin, when one of you daughters is born a rich dark brown, but the other is born a fair blond white, genes breaking through from an Austrian grandmother?

What do you do on your first Christmas day living in an Islamic country, when you have celebrated Santa delivering presents to your six year old son, only for him to inform the rest his Muslim classmates that they haven't had presents therefore they must have been bad?

How do you work through your reactions to a culture where the norm is for children to travel to school unaccompanied from the age of six, when every other culture you have lived in insists that you take your child to school up to the age of ten? Do you make your child even more of an outsider by bucking the system? What if something goes wrong?

Just a few of the situations faced,described, and wept through in the pages of this excellent book.

As a minor quibble, I wasn't sure about the ordering of the contributions. Firstly, I feel that the first contribution is the most inaccessible in terms of literary style, and I hope that this does not put people of from engaging with the rest of the book. Secondly, I didn't pick up any clear narrative or thematic threads underlying the ordering of the contributions, though this might be due to my lack of insight. ( )