“A Short Walk Through a Wide World” by Douglas Westerbeke

3/5

Read as an ARC via NetGalley. Book publishes April 29, 2024.

It’s like “The Invisible Life of Addie Larue” did drugs, wrote a diary, and all the pages got shuffled back in a random order. But, like, not in a bad way?

Aubrey Torvel is sick. Not the kind of sick a doctor can cure, though. Sick in a way that only she can fight—by traveling. Aubrey can only stay in a place for 3 days, sometimes 4 if she’s very lucky, before she starts dying again. Rapidly. And so, she walks.

I’ve got to be honest, this…wasn’t my favorite book. The writing was good and the plot had promise, but it just didn’t hit the notes I was hoping for. Like Addie LaRue, Aubrey is a French woman with a curse brought on by an ignorant mistake; said curse also likes to make its presence known by speaking with the respectively cursed person on occasion. So no major points for originality there. Unlike Addie, though, Aubrey is remembered. She’s even something of a legend. And she’s mortal…ish. She can definitely age. The plot itself also deviated from Addie’s (which makes sense, as they’re two entirely separate books by two entirely separate authors), but the overlap between them is difficult to ignore.

The story follows Aubrey’s life as she travels, picking out moments in time to view along the way. It doesn’t really go in any particular order, and that might have to do with Aubrey’s memory itself becoming frayed at the edges. A life spent traveling every few days is bound to start running together, I suppose, but it does make for a slightly chaotic read.

We meet the various people Aubrey encounters, and we see her story retold as she discusses her life with them. For all her interesting adventures, though, I found myself not really having a strong desire to stick with the story. It didn’t suck me in, and I wasn’t overly anxious to pick it up and continue reading. Aubrey is smart and funny, but that didn’t come through for me except in very tiny doses. There were multiple times while I was reading that I felt like the story should be coming to a close, that surely I was almost done, only to look at my progress bar and see that I was 30% done, of 40%, or 70%. It just dragged.

Even the ending didn’t do it for me. There was no real resolution. I’m very much one of those readers who likes to have everything in order before the end—I want to know why things happened, who was involved, and a reasonable expectation of how the characters’ lives ended up. It doesn’t take much; ‘they were cursed by an ancient scroll and then they broke it and everyone lived happily ever after’ is good enough for me. No such luck with this book.

This story’s saving grace, though, was the writing itself. For all the content’s faults, the actual writing was nothing to laugh at. The imagination to come up with Aubrey’s adventures, and the skill to make such an unusual premise come to life in any capacity, is incredible. While lacking the prosaic beauty of Addie LaRue, the depth, detail, and saturation of the scenes in this book are a powerhouse in their own right.

The short version of this review is that the writing was great, but the plot was lacking. I do think that a lot of it has to do with the types of books I usually read; this was a very different type of fantasy story, and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. But, if trippy, speculative lit is your thing, you might really enjoy this book! If you like things wrapped up in neat little bows with all the answers, maybe not so much.

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