A Short Walk Through a Wide World - Douglas Westerbeke - ★.½

AUTHOR: Douglas Westerbeke

GENRE: Historical Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: April 2, 2024

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical fantasy that feels like an endless walk through a wayward world. Poor character sketching, random timelines, ad-hoc plot development, needless exoticism, unsatisfactory ending. This will be among my biggest disappointments of the year. However, to those who believe that reading is more about the journey than about the destination, this ride could be *trippy*.

Plot Preview:

When nine-year-old Aubry Tourvel, a pampered and stubborn girl, finds a wooden puzzle ball, she is surprised that no matter how much she tried to throw it away, it keeps coming back to her. A few days later, she begins to bleed uncontrollably from every orifice of her body. When medical treatment doesn’t help, she runs away, only to find the mysterious ailment disappear. Soon she realises that this act of being on the move keeps the affliction away. Whenever she stops at a place for more than a few days, it returns. Thus begins a lifelong journey spanning years and continents and a mysterious library and some unexpected paths. But being forced to leave behind anyone that she interacts with as the disease demands newer locations to venture into, Aubry has to learn how to navigate her “short walk through the wide world” by herself.

The story comes to us in Aubry’s third-person perspective.

With such a great title, cover, and premise, it goes without saying that I had expected a lot from this book. It is an creative and ambitious debut work, no doubt. But that alone isn’t enough to deliver a memorable experience.

The blurb calls this “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi.” I have not had the pleasure of reading either of these books, so I cannot say if this claim is true.

Bookish Yays:

🌎 The imaginativeness of the premise – fabulous. I wonder what I would have done were I in Aubry’s place. (Well, I definitely wouldn’t have done most of what she ended up doing.)

🌎 The title and the cover – appealing.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🏝️ Aubry – interesting, determined, and resourceful, but also adamant and self-serving. Many questions about her personality aren’t answered. Also, her character doesn’t seem to grow much (maturity-wise) over the course of the story.

🏝️ The places through which Aubry travels – Mostly well-written and quite vivid. But it is basically a list of all “exotic” locales in the world, India included. Not once in all her decades does Aubry’s wanderlust end up in a boring white city.

Bookish Nays:

💸 The lack of detailing on Aubry’s “curse” and the resultant illness. I might have been happier with the book if the end had offered at least some basic explanation for the events. But we learn only the whats and hardly any whys.

💸 The minimal elaboration on the other two key fantastical elements of the story – the puzzle ball and the magical but elusive libraries. They pop up fairly regularly but we don’t learn anything significant about them.

💸 All the coloured characters in every location falling over backwards to satisfy the needs of the white ‘memsahib‘ – ugh! Even the appearance of India didn’t satisfy me as it was mostly (stereo)typical.

💸 The conversations – very stilted and artificial in tone.

💸 The deus ex machina at the end – I always hate such “jump the shark” kind of endings.

💸 The regular headjumping across characters, even though the narration was in Aubry’s third-person perspective – annoying.

💸 The timeline, which is as random in its meandering as Aubry herself. I get that she lost track of time over the years, but the lack of detail makes things that much difficult for us readers. I am not talking of just months but of years and decades without time indicators. The narrative also goes back and forth in time, with only the chapter titles helping a bit.

💸 The character development for the other characters is barely there. We only know what they do for Aubry without going into their motives.

💸 The blurb calls it an “inspiring” story. What is it meant to inspire: endless travel? Enjoying the journey with the focus on material and physical needs? Learning how to deal with problems by running away from them? I am not a deep person anyway, so if this book aimed at something metaphysical or philosophical, it bounced right off my thick skull.

💸 Graphic violence against animals. There are many other triggers, but this was the only gratuitous one that wasn’t necessary for the plot and could easily have been toned down.

All in all, this book is for those who believe that reading is more for the journey than for the destination. To me – a lover of journey AND destination, this seemingly never-ending sojourn went nowhere. Imagine reading 400 pages to end up with a dozen question marks – what a disappointment!

The first half was still an okayish expedition, but I wandered through the second half of the voyage more out of duty than interest. Perhaps the book should have taken the title seriously and limited the plot to a short trek of maybe half the length.

Then again, many readers have enjoyed the globetrotting experience this book offers, so do read other opinions before you decide whether to embark upon this odyssey.

1.5 stars. (rounding up wherever applicable because this is a debut work and the author is a librarian – viva la library!)

My thanks to Avid Reader Press for providing the DRC of “A Short Walk Through a Wide World” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.