Digital Reads Reviews

Many thanks to Kelly and Love Books Tours for my spot on this Blog Tour.

A beautiful book about a mother’s journey through the various nations to follow her son’s footsteps.

Maya was mother to 2 sons and twins daughters. Her first son Jamie was estranged and lost, second Joe was traveling the world and lost, twin daughters were a bit clingy. On being called to identify a dead body, she found her second son Joe’s journal. She decided to follow him, do everything he had noted in his journal. Meeting various people in her vagabond life, a crisis and a revelation made Maya understand who she was and what she wanted.

My first book by Tracey Scott-Townsend, the writing kept me going as if I were on a gentle wave, imagining what this mother had gone through. The author’s writing was detailed and showed me the vagabond life and how the different people live each day, completely. It had its own hardships and required a different kind of mental strength.

Through the travels, I was shown the dynamics of this family and how the expectations and disappointments made them grow further apart on different countries. I loved Maya’s travels and her revelations. She was an active voice in the book who maintened her relationship with the girls via emails. Staying further apart brought them closer.

The emotions in the book had me reading it with a lump in my throat, I felt sad for this Vagabond Mother when she realized her mistakes and so proud of her when she took steps to be a better person. The only niggle I had was that the story was told in different timelines every few chapters so that confused me.

Overall, the author’s storytelling came to life with her words and in her emotions, and I felt sad bidding goodbye to this Vagabond Mother when I reached the last page. A sweet read.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley and publisher, and this is my journey into its pages, straight from the heart!! STRICTLY HONEST AND UNBIASED.

All my reviews can be read here

All Maya Galen wanted was a happy family, stifling her inner urges to explore the wider world for the sake of being there for her children. But parenting with her husband, Con, wasn’t always easy. Their eldest son, Jamie, broke off all contact some years ago and now Joe, the apple of her eye, has done the same after an argument with his parents about his chosen way of life. Maya and Con are left rattling around ‘The Cottages’ – their enormous home in a Lincolnshire village, wondering what they did wrong.

When they are called to Australia to identify the body of a young man, Maya is given her son’s journal. After a sleepless night she makes the decision to follow in her youngest son’s footsteps and become a vagabond, leaving her husband and daughters to return to the UK without her. From now on she needs to rely on her own physical and emotional strength.

Following Joe’s hand-drawn maps and journal entries, Maya travels from Australia to Denmark and beyond, meeting many young people like Joe along the way and trying to discover what it means to be alive. As months turn into years she can’t bear to go back to the opression of her perfect home. Slowly, she comes to understand that what she is discovering is her most basic human self.

Another family crisis, involving one of her twin daughters, eventually forces Maya to return home. As she treads carefully through the wreckage of her marriage, unfinished business is tied up and the family once again becomes complete, but in a different way from before.

Publication Date: January 2020