In this cross-genre work, Krummeck (Beyond the Baobab, 2014) interweaves a memoir of her immigration to America with a creative imagining of her great-great-grandmother’s journey to South Africa as a missionary’s wife. … Krummeck’s own story is written as a memoir, but Sarah’s reads like a historical novel, with factual material and imagined dialogue side-by-side. These forms elegantly dovetail when the author inserts her first-person perspective into Sarah’s narrative: “Sarah had conceived her fourth child around the time of their third wedding anniversary—I like to think on their wedding anniversary.” Krummeck also evocatively describes the landscape through her ancestor’s eyes: “The clean air was pure and rich, the redolent earth a tawny ochre.” The present and past meld well, creating a sense that the author has a foot in both worlds.

— Kirkus Reviews

In this cross-genre work, Krummeck (Beyond the Baobab, 2014) interweaves a memoir of her immigration to America with a creative imagining of her great-great-grandmother’s journey to South Africa as a missionary’s wife. … Krummeck’s own story is written as a memoir, but Sarah’s reads like a historical novel, with factual material and imagined dialogue side-by-side. These forms elegantly dovetail when the author inserts her first-person perspective into Sarah’s narrative: “Sarah had conceived her fourth child around the time of their third wedding anniversary—I like to think on their wedding anniversary.” Krummeck also evocatively describes the landscape through her ancestor’s eyes: “The clean air was pure and rich, the redolent earth a tawny ochre.” The present and past meld well, creating a sense that the author has a foot in both worlds.

— Lauren LaRocca, Baltimore Magazine

Judith Krummeck’s new book, “Old New Worlds” (Green Writers Press, 360 pp., $24.95), occupies a unique spot on the spectrum of creative non-fiction. Half the book is actually historical fiction about her great-great-grandmother, Sarah Barker, who immigrated with her missionary husband, George, from England to the wilds of South Africa in the early nineteenth century. The other half is a memoir about the author’s own immigration from South Africa to the U.S., and her quest for the facts of Sarah’s life on which she based her imaginative story.

Krummeck intertwines the narratives to highlight the common themes. While the Barkers moved to Africa to bring Christianity to the native people, Krummeck eventually left to escape the reverberations of apartheid. As a U.S. citizen, she rejoiced in the election of a black man as president, then watched as the dream of living in a more enlightened place and time was cut short. On the other hand she mines her own love for her adopted country to fill in Sarah’s experience of the beauties and hardships of Africa.

But in most ways, life among the missionaries and native tribespeople of South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century had very little in common with our daily lives in the 21st century, and Krummeck fills in details of travel, domestic life, relationships, and religious practice with careful research. In prose of rare intelligence and elegance, Judith Krummeck brings a novelist’s vision to the true story of her great-great-grandmother, interweaving past and present in a way that illuminates both.

— Marion Winik, Baltimore Fishbowl