Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North: From the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Harold Fry, 3)

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AND-I also love what the author shared in the opening prologue-that once she turned in the final draft for this book-she went into her garden, and imagined a new set of characters and questions who had been “politely standing out of view”-ready to talk to her, when she was ready. Maureen, thinks of herself as not a nice person and at times, she’s not. She’s angry at times, sometimes down right nasty, but I mostly saw her as a grieving mother, trying to find a way to go on,a way to cope with her loss. When she discovers that Queenie made a sea side garden and in it a monument to Maureen and Harold’s son David, she knows she has to see it. It turned out to be a gift to a grieving mother, whose journey there allows her to make peace with others, but mostly with herself. I admire Rachel Joyce's writing and how she creates living, breathing characters. Readers who loved her books about Harold and Queenie will want to read this one, also. Maureen is written as a novella and is about Harold's wife. I don't believe it can be read without benefit of having read at least one of the earlier books.

Harold's walk and Queenie's death was 10 years ago, and Maureen decides to make her own pilgrimage to Queenie's seaside garden, hoping to find the monument to her son David that she's heard about. She goes alone, driving, not walking.She and Harold have been happy together the last ten years, but she still has an itch to try to understand their past. As with Harold’s and Queenie’s stories, Maureen thinks about her past and how she came to be who she is. Her mother was Maureen seemed short-tempered and resentful in the earlier books but has mellowed considerably. She hopes she’s better than her mother. I love that THIS book, is helping Harold Fry and Queenie Hennessy find a whole new audience with its release! This fascinating compendium traces phobias and manias through their rich social, cultural and medical history. We learn that in the US, a third of all people with phobias suffer from a terror of cats (ailurophobia) or dogs (cynophobia). As well as well-known behaviours, Summerscale highlights less obvious fears such as hippophobia (fear of horses, made famous in Freud’s “Little Hans” case study) and coulrophobia (a morbid fear of clowns). The Fell Now it's ten years later, and time to hear from Maureen, Harold's wife. She's about to take a journey of her own and, in the mix, gives her perspective of all that's happened before and after Harold's journey to visit Queenie.

Ten years ago, Harold Fry set off on his epic journey on foot to save a friend. But the story doesn’t end there. Now his wife, Maureen, has her own pilgrimage to make. At least he was happy, at least he was safe. And his health, too. At least he had that. It wasn’t that he was losing his mind, rather that he was deliberately taking things out of it that he no longer needed.” Maureen Fry is an emotionally damaged woman who is grieving for David, her son who died many years earlier. The third book of the Harold Fry trilogy revolves around Maureen, Harold's wife. The trilogy started when Harold went on a pilgrimage to visit his friend, Queenie, in a hospice. Years earlier, Queenie had made a memorial garden by the sea using found objects washed up by the ocean in combination with greenery and flowers. One part of the garden was dedicated to David Fry because Queenie regretted that she was unable to help the young man who committed suicide. Maureen is a woman, tough on the outside, but tender and fragile within. Through her husband's, Harold's journey, Maureen feels that she must go on her own journey ten years after Harold's famous walk. She leaves taking the car and along the way we are listening to her thoughts, the difficulties of her life, her failure she feels as a student, and mother. It was difficult to read in places, but I liked the growth Maureen experienced in the novel. Unlike her husband Harold who made friends along the way in his journey, Maureen finds it difficult to be kind to people and bristles at interactions with others.But Maureen is not like Harold. She struggles to bond with strangers, and the landscape she crosses has changed radically. She has little sense of what she'll find at the end of the road. All she knows is that she must get there.

Along the way she learns some necessary lessons. All her life she's felt she was 'being measured against something she didn't understand and would never get right.' Maybe that's why she has a tendency to judge other people, before they have the chance to judge her. Maureen Fry is an unlikely heroine – outspoken and sometimes abrasive, it takes time for readers to warm up to her. As we have seen her through the previous two books, ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ and “The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy’ she begins as quite an unlikeable character. But, as she embarks on her own journey of self-discovery, we come to know her better and start to appreciate all that she has been through over the years. Her journey starts when she receives an unexpected message from the North asking for help; driven by curiosity, Maureen sets off on a quest that takes her across some familiar places as well as some new ones – all while struggling with her own inner demons. I've found that readers' reactions to the first two books have been uneven. For example, I loved The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, but did not care for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.As with the other two books, I really enjoyed this one - Maureen has a somewhat eventful drive 'up North' from their West Country home, passing many of the landmarks and places that we do when travelling down to Cornwall every year, before reaching her destination and getting a different perspective on both her life and their son's suicide, which she has never been able to cope with: Rachel Joyce is deeply attuned to the complex rhythms of life and love and she sublimates this understanding, sentence by delicate, powerful, glistening sentence into an unforgettable story. It's beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming. I'll never forget this wonderful novel or the sunny, slightly teary day I spent reading it. Donal Ryan Rachel Joyce is so wise! She sees the 'essential loneliness of people' and digs into the causes of it. No matter what, they deserve respect. I am the richer for having read these books.