Homesick: My Own Story falls somewhere between autobiography and fiction. Many of the book's details, characters, and places are real, but Fritz compresses her thirteen-year experience in China into a two-year account, weaving the narrative recollections together with fictional threads. The autobiographical story has an episodic rather than a strictly linear plot, perhaps because Fritz based the book in part on journal entries from her childhood in China. In the same way that journal writing involves the exploration of thoughts and feelings rather than the simple recording of daily events, Homesick offers more than a chronological accumulation of incidents in Fritz's life. Rather than focusing on chronology, the story highlights the insights, emotions, and relationships that shape Fritz's personality and values. The title of the book, Homesick, reflects its thematic concern, implying that the primary focus of the story is not what Fritz did for thirteen...