Alpine Apprentice (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780820350721)

Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys--so, too, the languages she's obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic.

Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes's faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.

Author: Sarah Gorham
ISBN-10: 0820350729
ISBN-13: 9780820350721
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2017
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.48w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2017
Publishers Weekly 01/16/2017
Booklist 02/01/2017 pg. 10