The Year I Fell in Love and ....:by Deb Olin Unferth

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to choose two sentences at random from your current read. Identify the author and title for readers.


"What are you doing in El Salvador?"
"Turismo," I said. (I'd been told that if a soldier points a gun at you, you should always say "turismo.")  p. 20


Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
 by Deb Olin Unferth
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (February 1, 2011)
Genre: travel, memoir

Goodreads book description: "Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.

Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over."