It has been criticised by some for not being apologist for the often racist attitudes of Bobo's parents and those of other whites who drift in and out of the account.

The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the author’s "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family. Then my mind would wander to America, and how parents took their kids across it in covered wagons, and how dangerous that was because sometimes entire families were killed or died from starvation or other causes. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is about living through a civil war; it's about losing children and losing that war - and realising that the side you have been fighting for may well be the 'wrong' one. As a kid, you have no idea your parents are racist, so it can be uncomfortable to read of this families ideas of blacks, but also deeply informing. But my friend, who is a teacher, and who lives part time in Africa teaching English at a school she had started, recommended it.

Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. The family moves from farm to farm, so it would be easy to describe the land, in its exoticism, as endlessly various and endlessly the same, but Fuller has a talent for difference.

The closest Fuller comes to a commentary on racism is when telling about her boarding school desegregating. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame.The politics and the everyday struggle to make a living from the land are mixed with family tragedy; a sister drowned, a brother dead from meningitis and another stillborn. With the author's wry and sometimes hilarious prose, we feel her encounters with mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes and more. The book cycles from heartbreaking episodes to moments of crystal clear beauty and life affirming incidents. In the morning, when she's just on the pills, she's very sleepy and calm and slow and deliberate, like someone who isn't sure where her body ends and the world starts.