Review by Booklist Review
In her third nonfiction work, Schaap (Drinking with Men, 2013) departs from the food writing she's known for to explore the tenderness of grief. Widowed in her thirties after losing her husband to cancer, she loses her mother only a year later. Unsure of how to move forward with her life, she throws herself into what she's good at: travel writing. She sets her sights on Ireland, home to many of the poets and artists that she and her husband both adored. Over several years, she builds a new life in the seaside village of Glenarm, gaining peace in the wake of grief. This is a comforting read. A sense of wonder animates Schaap's prose. It would be easy, as an outsider, for Schaap to lean into the exoticism of her locale, but she tempers the quaint landscapes and immense political histories with a sense of genuine human connection. Through a meandering, thoughtful narrative, she shows how life grows in the aftermath of profound tragedy.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this affecting memoir, Schaap (Drinking with Men) traces her path forward after two devastating losses. In 2010, Schaap's husband died of cancer; the following year, her mother died after a long illness. Schaap's sorrow was compounded because she and her husband were separated when he first got sick and she and her mother had a strained relationship for most of Schaap's life. After their deaths, Schaap struggled to keep her head above water until a reporting trip took her to Glenarm, a hardscrabble coastal village in Northern Ireland, where she was reminded she was in "a country striving day after day to surmount sorrows of its own." She was so moved that, after returning home to New York City, she packed up and moved to Glenarm, forging tenuous friendships with her neighbors and investigating the region's difficult history as a means of moving on. Schaap marries a reporter's curiosity with a humorist's eye for detail, matching bits of regional history with hilarious anecdotes about her husband and mother (of her mom's shih tzu: " a sociopathic fuckup of a dog"). The result is a nuanced and poignant account of what comes after grief. Agent: Ashley Lopez, Waxman Literary. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Northern Ireland--based journalist and nonfiction writer reflects on the loss and grief that changed her life. When New York City native Schaap, author of Drinking With Men, went to read a favorite poem to her cancer-stricken husband, Frank, on Valentine's Day 2010, she did not know it would be the last time she would see him alive. The day afterward, he passed away while she was temporarily absent from his side. Flattened by grief and guilt, she ran away from the pain, visiting a city, Belfast, in a country she had loved during her student days in Dublin. From that point on, Northern Ireland--its rugged beauty, tortured but fascinating history, and quirky inhabitants--became her beacon of hope as she navigated new widowhood and more wounding deaths. Several trips to Ireland later and nearly a decade after Frank's death, Schaap took a chance on the impractical-seeming dream of pursuing a creative writing master's degree in Belfast. Immediately, her life opened her to new vistas: first, graduate school, and then pandemic lockdown with a sculptor whom she had met on her first trip to Belfast and eventually married. Though Jewish and a foreigner, the author quickly found her place in a world that surprised her with its openness and its willingness to move past a history of sectarian violence. Most unexpectedly of all, though, was the solace and profound understanding of grief she gained by interacting with people willing to share their own stories of loss. Death was never fair in what it took away; however, to recall with gratitude what was lost could ease suffering and even touch wellsprings of the deepest joy. As Schaap writes, "To love is to remember; to remember is to keep loving." A poignant and moving memoir featuring a well-rendered story of pain and redemption. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
