The unforgotten coat

For some reason this book didn't really grab me like I was hoping it would. At the beginning I didn't care for the author's voice, and I wasn't feeling the choice to have the author narrate as her adult self. In the end I understood why that choice was made, but the narrative voice sounded like a child's voice and not an adult's. I think that's also why I didn't really get the story from the beginning, because I was assuming the narrator was reliable, since she was telling it from her adult perspective. She knew, as an adult, that these kids were just messing with everyone, that their coats and photos weren't really from Mongolia and that everyone treating them like they didn't know American culture were probably just being strung along. But the narration really sounded like a child's voice, who believed all of the things that Chingis was telling her and not an adult who had an adult skepticism about the whole thing. So it all kind of felt really forced, and not as magical as I feel they were probably going for. The afterword was cute, though, because it was a real story. I wish this book had been a non-fiction account of that truth instead of the fictional version of it.