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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The fact was she’d had the satnav disconnected. She couldn’t bear that nice voice urging directions at her and telling her last minute that she’d missed the turn. Maureen was of the generation who had grown up with the phone on the hall table, and a map in the glove compartment. Even online shopping was a stretch. Twenty lemons instead of two, and all that kind of thing. 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. Hers is a very different quest from Harold’s, and her private nature makes it hard for her to ask for or accept help. Having a car means she can retreat, be on her way, take her leave without needing anyone.

Maureen Fry has settled into the quiet life she now shares with her husband Harold after his iconic walk across England. Now, ten years later, an unexpected message from the North disturbs her equilibrium again, and this time it is Maureen’s turn to make her own journey.

This was a poignant, lovely read, filled with compassion, a story of both growth and healing with a perfect ending.

This was David. This was him. This was angry; It was violent... Too fragile for the world and yet full of youth and complication and pomp and arrogance. She did not know how such a piece of wood could have survived the wind and rain and yet, secure in Queenie's Garden, it had held fast."

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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Maureen_Fry_and_the_Angel_of_the_North__Maureen_-_Rachel_Joyce.pdf, Maureen_Fry_and_the_Angel_of_the_North__Maureen_-_Rachel_Joyce.epub An unforgettable story. It's beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming.' Donal Ryan But a FEW books, stay in our hearts, and become the ones you recommend over and over again, no matter how many years have passed. That had been the case with the first two books in this series: “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” and (especially) “The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy”. But she’s trying to learn to be kind, make a nice comment even when unnecessary. She has seen herself (as well as her mother) and vows to do better.

When Maureen sets out on her journey, she doesn't realise that she's going to find her true self, but ultimately that is what she does. I enjoyed this every bit as much as The Love Songs of Queenie Hennessy, and rather more than The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. BTW, you will need to read the preceding two books or this will make very little sense to you. This is book 3 in the Harold Fry trilogy and while it helps to have read them all, it’s not essential. It’s been years since I read Harold so I could barely remember him and it didn’t matter. Maureen is very much a character in her own right and this story is hers and hers alone.My favourite quote: 'It wasn't that he was losing his mind, rather that he was deliberately taking things out of it that he no longer needed.' I would like to say that Maureen had a total transformation, but that would have been unrealistic. By the story's end, Maureen had thawed somewhat and grew a bit more understanding of other people and herself. What I love about this book is how vague the synopsis is, allowing readers to go in blind. It's an intensely personal journey for Maureen and you feel her pain the entire way. You realize how lost she is from herself, how out of control she feels in her life, and how different she feels from Harold and everyone else. You will get to know Maureen intimately, warts and all.

Along the way, Maureen encounters many people who help shape her story in different ways. Each person helps Maureen confront different aspects of herself, whether it’s courage or vulnerability or strength – and by the end of the book, readers have seen a full transformation in Maureen. 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 This book is set ten years after the events in the first two books. Maureen has discovered, from one of Harold's former walking partners, that Queenie Hennessey had made a sea garden in the dunes near her former home, which was now called The Garden of Relics. Part of this garden is a shrine to Harold and Maureen's son, David, who had committed suicide thirty years before at the age of 20 - and Maureen is determined to visit the garden to see this shrine. So, with Harold's support, she sets off to drive to Northumberland to visit Queenie's garden, which turns into another journey of self-discovery, this time on Maureen's part....

Am I going to find out next that the gentle, kind neighbor Rex has to go through some terrible, health threatening trial before he can be happy, when I have innocently thought he was content all along. Really, what a wonderful side character Rex has been for me throughout this series. I hope Rex can live on in peace. Overall, I enjoyed this series very much but it shows me that the less I know about some people, the better. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday for providing a digital ARC of Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North by Rachel Joyce for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. The place was a hovel. She could try as hard as she liked to be nice but there was no nice way of saying it.