Lost in China: A Memoir of WWII

In the audio version of Dobbs’s debut memoir about growing up in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, narrator Alexandra Potocka speaks with youthful innocence and nuanced voices for the author’s family and others. Opening with the difficulties of translating Chinese to English, Potocka eases into a dramatic prologue about East Asian politics in the 1930s and jumps into the drama of the Dobbs family tossing German-made items overboard from their ship. Vignettes of their life in China follow, as they relocate from Shanghai to Chongqing, then Chengdu, split up, travel down the Burma Road, and leave China. Potocka captures the family’s emotions—the children’s fear at hearing air raid sirens sound and worry when their parents travel to Hong Kong; their horror when their mother was incarcerated in a POW camp, and their joy when they are reunited. Their shock at their father’s death, and the lingering effects of the war are made near palpable. Potocka switches to her own adult voice when narrating author notes that follow each chapter. While the notes are informative, they often break the momentum of the narrative. Other issues include the narrator’s selective choice of British accents for the parents but not the children and a handful of mispronunciations.