Review: "The Accidental Plus One" by Alison Ripley Cubitt

The Accidental Plus One by Alison Ripley Cubitt
Published September 2024 via Lambert Nagle Media
★★★

Cubitt had lived in the UK for decades when she spotted a job ad that would change the trajectory of her life: not a job ad for her, but for her husband. He got the job, and when they moved to New Zealand, they set of a series of moves from house to house and country to country.

I love travel memoir and moving-abroad memoir and, yes, trailing-spouse memoir, so I was eager to pick this one up. The Accidental Plus One kept me engaged for a while, but eventually I realized that there wasn't a ton of through-line or tension beyond "moving to the next place and finding a house to buy there." (I also love house memoirs, as it happens, but usually I want quite a lot of detail about said houses to qualify books about houses as house memoirs!) This ends up being quite anecdotal; lots of specific details about various experiences, but few of those stories go anywhere or come up again later in the book. (Also, Cubitt took on a job as a relocation specialist, helping to find other people places to live and so on—which is great—but she lost all relatability for me when she described a family as having a "limited budget" (51)...and then it turned out that while they were hoping to keep it to $725,000 or so (52), they could stretch beyond that. I know real estate prices are wild, and were even twenty-odd years ago, but three quarters of a million dollars as a "limited" budget just breaks my poor little brain.)

Still fun, but I think you'll get out of this if you go in expecting anecdotes than if you're looking for more character development and rooted sense of place.