Book Synopsis:
All Maya Galen wanted was a happy family, stifling her inner urges to explore the wider world for the sake of being there for her children. But parenting with her husband, Con, wasn’t always easy. Their eldest son, Jamie, broke off all contact some years ago and now Joe, the apple of her eye, has done the same after an argument with his parents about his chosen way of life. Maya and Con are left rattling around ‘The Cottages’ – their enormous home in a Lincolnshire village, wondering what they did wrong.
When they are called to Australia to identify the body of a young man, Maya is given her son’s journal. After a sleepless night she makes the decision to follow in her youngest son’s footsteps and become a vagabond, leaving her husband and daughters to return to the UK without her. From now on she needs to rely on her own physical and emotional strength.
Following Joe’s hand-drawn maps and journal entries, Maya travels from Australia to Denmark and beyond, meeting many young people like Joe along the way and trying to discover what it means to be alive. As months turn into years she can’t bear to go back to the opression of her perfect home. Slowly, she comes to understand that what she is discovering is her most basic human self.
Another family crisis, involving one of her twin daughters, eventually forces Maya to return home. As she treads carefully through the wreckage of her marriage, unfinished business is tied up and the family once again becomes complete, but in a different way from before.
The Vagabond Mother is available in paperback on the 10th January 2020. You can pre-order your copy using the link below.
My Review:
This was a heartwarming and poignant read from a new author to me.
The characters are great creations and I warmed to them quickly. I particularly liked Maya as I found her to be a very honest person who is trying her best to discover her failings and work out how to fix them. As a mum my biggest fear is that my kids aren’t going to want to know me when they’re older so the storyline had quite an effect on me. I found I wanted to keep reading to find out what happens and if she gets the answers she wants.
The descriptions in this book are very vivid so that the reader feels like they are actually there experiencing everything alongside the characters. It was wonderful to visit all the different places and cultures to learn more about them. The descriptions of the vagabond lifestyle was very interesting as I didn’t know much about it before reading this book.
Overall I thought this was a beautifully written, intriguing book that I enjoyed reading. It is a little slow in places which makes it hard to read at times but my desire to find out what happens made me want to keep reading. The story is told from the point of view of Maya and Joe which took a little while to get used to but it was interesting to see the two different stories.
Huge thanks to Kelly from Love Books Tours for inviting me onto the blog tour and to WildPress for my copy of this book.
About The Author:
Tracey is a visual artist who began to write full-time in 2010. She is happiest on the road in the Bus-with-a-Woodstove and in the cosy domain of her shed. Her novels are about family relationships, a sense of place, sexual love and motherhood, the lynchpins of human emotion. She has four grown children, a husband and various animals.
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