Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* While this memoir is built on common themes small-town girl, desperate to escape to the big city, lands herself in trouble they're just scaffolding. Liptrot's home is the windblown Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, a place both easy and difficult to escape. After too many years of hard drinking and partying in London, and too many wrecked relationships, she finally admits that she is an alcoholic and returns home. It feels like failure at first, but gradually Liptrot finds a way to live sober and appreciate things she once fled. She reconnects with her divorced parents, mentally ill father and evangelical Christian mother, both of whom still live on the island. Liptrot is clear-eyed when she describes the great emptiness left after giving up alcohol and why the temptations to start drinking again still nag at her. This may make the book sound bleak to potential readers, but it isn't. Whether she writes of walking along the wind-scoured coasts or taking polar-bear dips in the icy waters, her prose is spare, lean, and beautiful, much like the country about which she writes.--Curbow, Joan Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When Liptrot leaves rehab in London, she returns to her Orkney childhood home, the interior and exterior landscapes of which she maps in this spectacular memoir. Winds lash the land, sometimes moving tons of rock, as Liptrot weathers her cravings. On an island where the map can be "altered in the morning," Liptrot remembers her drunken buzz through London. Descriptions of millennial city life are sorrowfully precise: "Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end." Later, she wonders, "Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads... in various states of... mental anguish on an institutional carpet?" And yet, transcendence follows. She drives Orkney at night listening for threatened birds. She searches for a fata morgana, marvels at seals, but nevertheless wonders-why bother when one can "watch nature documentaries on YouTube?" Even with "twenty tabs open,", this magnificent memoir is a record of transformation in its truest sense-what it means to leave behind the tabs for experience. Orkney legends tell of seals changing into humans, but, here, Liptrot is the shape-shifter, peeling off her wetsuit like blubber after snorkeling in the ice-cold sea. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
After a decade in London, a troubled woman returns home to a rural island in northern Scotland, hoping to heal.Liptrot begins with the harrowing details of her birth. When she was just hours old, her mother rode a wheelchair down the runway of an airport and placed her in the lap of her straightjacket-clad father, who was to be airlifted to a mental hospital on the mainland. It's a fitting introduction to the chronicle of a life plagued with hardship. The author grew up on a farm high on the cliffs of Orkney: "nothing but cliffs and ocean between it and Canada." Her parents were outsiders from England who had come to the insular island to start anew, and they were an odd pairan evangelical Christian and a bipolar schizophrenic. Liptrot longed to escape and eventually did, to London. Of course, the pain didn't disappear; she found herself covering it up with destructive behavior: drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sex. As she writes, "my life was rough and windy and tangled." Bookstores are packed with countless addiction memoirs, and there are also plenty that see a prodigal son or daughter coming home to slay his or her demons. What makes Liptrot's book different is the otherworldly setting. When she returned to the Orkneys, she immersed herself in nature, taking long walks around her family's wind-swept land, early-morning swims in the frigid cold Atlantic Ocean, watching the northern lights from an old theater in the middle of town, and tracking the flocks of birds coming down from the Arctic. Eventually, Liptrot found peace and began to imagine a kind of future she had never before thought possible. She also includes a glossary to define such terms as "haar" (sea fog) and "kirk" (church). An ordinary addiction memoir set in an extraordinary placeworth reading for the descriptions of life on a "beautiful, barely touched stretch of land." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
