The Current Rate of Exchange

Rose, a tall, bumbling American woman, travels to New Zealand to re-establish ties with her late mother’s family, navigating the otherworldly tension of traveling in the months after 9/11. Her ill-planned adventure turns her life around, and that of Nora, her New Zealand cousin, whose family problems immediately begin to involve Rose. Nora’s elderly mother, who broke off ties with Rose’s family; Nora’s unemployed husband who confides his dreams to Rose instead of to his wife; and Nora’s brother whose emotional meltdown from losing the family farm all challenge Rose to bring her family’s past full circle. A sudden romance with the farm manager with the mysterious past of his own was not, however, on her original agenda. She is anxious about continuing it lest she repeat mistakes her American father and New Zealand mother made. Armed with old family letters, Rose retraces her mother’s footsteps as a World War II government agricultural worker, or Land Girl. The information Rose learns from the letters is key to preventing a tragedy in Nora’s family.