Book Reviews

Review and interview with bookpleasures.com

With At Home Abroad: An American Girl in Africa, Nancy Henderson-James has proven herself to be a masterful talent in crafting a captivating memoir infused with a great deal of vivacity, introspection and even some humor and poetry. (Read more…)

Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress

“Nancy Henderson-James has written a tremendous book.  Her writing skillfully weaves the threads of a beautiful exotic setting, the discoveries and tensions of adolescence, the powerful shaping attachment to a very particular place, and the unfillable void of absence.  I highly recommend her memoir to (Read more…)

Feathered Quill Book Review excerpt by Ellen Feld

“Where this book shines is in the relationships between the American missionaries and the inhabitants of Angola; their differences and similarities. Slowly, as the author grows, she comes to realize the disparity between the two. (Read more…)

Rebecca Reads review excerpt by Kam Aures

“One of the things that stood out the most for me was the fact that “children were given independence very early.  It wasn’t unusual for them to leave the family at age six or eight to attend school far from home and to see their parents only a few times during the school year.” (p.123) (Read more…)

Reader Views review excerpt by Olivera Baumgartner -Jackson

“The author’s love of Africa shines in all the little scenes of everyday life she writes about. She truly brings the land and its people to life, and make one yearn for simpler, if not always gentler times. (Read more…)

Judy Hogan, Founding Editor of Carolina Wren Press

“At Home Abroad is a stunning autobiography of Nancy Henderson-James’s youth in Africa. Heart wrenching is her uprooting at age 15, from Angola, whose natural world, people, customs, and languages she so loved, when the war for independence began. (Read more…)

Pat Schneider, author: Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press, 2003

“In this intimate and detailed autobiography, Nancy Henderson-James throws open the door on a room in the history of religion that has been locked and double-bolted: the life of a child of Christian missionaries in the 1950’s in Africa.  (Read more…)