I thoroughly enjoyed reading Evelyn Kohl LaTorre’s memoir of her time in the Peace Corps in the 1960’s! The book starts with the author looking over a precipice in the Andes, towards a river 5,000 feet below, wondering what on earth she had got herself into, and with those words I was hooked. Between Inca Walls tells us about Evelyn’s two years working for the Peace Corps in remote areas in Peru, but also about her upbringing in rural Montana, her ties to the Catholic religion, and her own coming of age in an era where everything was changing in the US. 

Evelyn is the eldest of 5, born into a small farming community in Montana to a strict Catholic, but loving, family. As a child she was super resourceful, finding work and selling her own creations to make her own money from the age of 11, all the while studying with the aim to discover more of the world once she graduated. Instead of settling into marriage and kids like many of her peers at that time, she took another route: she joined the newly created Peace Corps in an attempt to both see the world and give something back.

I love how the author writes. She draws you into her time in Peru, describing people, places, and events in a way that you can easily imagine them. She has one heck of a memory too, because her descriptions of things that happened over 50 years ago are so detailed and exact! (She must have kept a very good journal of the time too, something that always helps me remember special details of my own travels years and years later). I also love how honest she is with the reader. She goes into Mexico, and then Peru, naive about where she is heading, what she is planning to do, and what she is going to feel. She tells us of the times that she thought she was helping, when actually she was imposing her own values on a different culture, and she also tells us of how she grapples with her own sexual awakening against her Catholic upbringing. As someone who also traveled a lot in my early 20’s, living in communal settings in the Middle East, I recognized a lot of myself in the author’s words. My own experiences may have been in the early 2000’s rather than the 1960’s, but there was a lot I could relate to in this book. Falling in love far away from home, in a different setting, with someone from a South American country in my early 20’s… Totally done that! 

It was really interesting to learn more about the early days of the Peace Corps. I was surprised at just how the volunteers were just thrown into certain areas and basically told to figure out with the locals what they would be doing! It was also great to see just how much training the volunteers had to go through before being sent on a mission somewhere. I’m sure things are a little more structured nowadays, but I really enjoyed reading about the early days of the movement, and also how women and men were equal participants in the volunteer work. 

Definitely a recommended read! I couldn’t put this memoir down, and Evelyn did a wonderful job making her own story read like a novel. I’m also glad that she put a great emphasis on the importance for the organization to focus on having volunteers learn indigenous languages so that they can communicate properly with local populations. And the front cover is just gorgeous! (Also… I really hope Evelyn writes another memoir to tell us all what happens after the last page of Between Inca Walls!! As an immigrant in a relationship with another immigrant from a completely different part of the world than me, with three US born children, these types of stories really interest me, and I would love to read more about Evelyn and Antonio’s life).

I received an advance copy of this beautiful memoir in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the publisher, agent, and author for this!