Review: "The Slow Road North" by Rosie Schaap

The Slow Road North by Rosie Schaap
Published August 2024 via Mariner Books
★★★★

This is the second book I've read recently by a Rosie with an Ireland connection, which feels like a nice coincidence. Very different stories, but with some other odd coincidences: In A Rosie Life in Italy, the author describes leaving Ireland for Italy in part to escape grief...while in The Slow Road North, the author describes leaving New York for Northern Ireland, in part to escape grief.

He was not one of those people who say they are ready for death. Can those people be serious? There were still too many books Frank wanted to read. (loc. 99*)

I say 'escape grief', but that's not right: Schaap moved to a village in Northern Ireland after her husband got ill and died, far too young, and after her mother too died, but she did not move to escape grief—she needed to be able to fully process her grief in a way that she was unable to do in New York, with its fast pace and all its ghosts. New York was home. But sometimes home is not enough. In Glenarm, she sought a new kind of life: a degree in writing, a new community, people who did not shy away from grief or pain but accepted them as part of life. And she learned a great deal: about the Troubles, and the rifts that remained in Glenarm, even if they were quieter than before; it's fascinating to read about her experience being Jewish in a place that was for so long split between Protestant and Catholic, with little thought given to people who might fall outside those categories.

Schaap talks a little about the choice of the title for the book, but it feels right: it's a fairly understated book, with measured peaks and lows rather than crashing ones, despite the grief and loss that underpin the story. Character-driven, if you will; it's well into the book before Schaap gets into her relationship with her mother and who her mother was as a person, and it's a wise choice, because Schaap's mother was clearly nothing if not a complicated person, but that's allowed to come second to love.

When Frank died and my mother was too unwell to come to the funeral, I asked her to promise me that she wouldn't die that year, too. She made me that promise and she kept it. She died one year and thirteen days after Frank. (2414)

(That line low-key devastated me; there was a while when it looked like I'd lose both my parents within a year—I did not; my mother is back to her extremely energetic self—and while it's absolutely a different scenario, I get how terrifying the prospect of losing two loved ones so close together is. I've already moved away from my parents, but I can well imagine picking up my whole life and restarting after so devastating a loss.)

This is one for readers who are in it for character and rumination and the slow road north through grief. It's a lovely take.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.