The Lauras by Sara Taylor is a road-trip story as Ma leaves her husband in Virginia and takes to the road with her thirteen-year old child, Alex. I really liked those parts of the novel in which Sara Taylor describes their journey and the places they travel through or stay at for a while, sometimes sleeping in the car, sometimes in a motel, and sometimes for a longer stay whilst she earns enough money to continue their journey. But I didn’t like the structure of the book as much, because it is basically just a collection of stories that Ma tells Alex – stories about her childhood and teenage years; about her childhood in Sicily, the time she spent in foster homes, and the friends she made, several of them called Laura- as they travel to visit people from her past. This structure makes the book disjointed, especially as neither Alex nor the reader knows where it is going or when/if it will come to an end. It unsettled me in that respect.

It’s narrated in the first person by Alex, looking back some 30 years to that journey. Alex was a shy and lonely teenager, unable to fit in with others and unsure about sexuality and gender. It makes for very uncomfortable reading in places as Alex is confronted by the misunderstandings and abuse of others. Ma is also a troubled person, having suffered various traumas, hardships and emotional insecurities. Both of them have itchy feet, not happy to stay for long in one place and unable to relate easily to others.

It’s a book about identity, about outsiders, and about parenting and relationships. I liked the various meditations on memory, its unreliable nature and slipperiness and on reality. Alex observes that we don’t actually have perfect memories of what happened, but just have fragments that we piece together to understand and make sense of events, to explain our life to ourselves. After they’ve gone all we have left of people are their stories, not necessarily the stories they told us, but as we remember those stories. Alex realises in later life that we can gloss over some memories or can pretend to ourselves we have forgotten certain times and places, until some unexpected smell or sound drops us back into ‘that awkward, adolescent body’.

I can’t say that it’s a book I enjoyed or would want to re-read. It’s not a book I was eager to get back to once I put it down, but it certainly gave me much to think about.

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a review.
The Lauras is the story of a mother and her child after they leave the father and take off on some charted but mysterious route across the U.S. as designed by the mother. Even as this trip is one of the mother's making, Alex finds that it becomes his/her journey as Alex grows up on the road, meeting a darker side of life, encountering hormones, adapting to a nomadic lifestyle.
The book was interesting but after a while I was just like ENOUGH!!! Lots of plot lines to absorb. But overall a great read

This book was the perfect road-trip companion. I read this in the space of 24 hours, half of which was on the road.

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read this, I'll be buying my own copy. And reading The Shore, which is in my living-room somewhere!

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy for review.

The Lauras is a part road trip, part coming of age novel. Writing thirty years after the events of the book, the narrator Alex opens the novel with a fierce marital row which ends with Ma storming out of the house with thirteen year old Alex in tow. Ma had a rather disturbed childhood and was in and out of foster care, in between times living with her parents or sometimes living in derelict buildings. What sustained her throughout was the relationships she had with five girls/women all called Laura and on this trip it seems she is intent on visiting them all in an attempt to come to terms with her past.

The America visited is not the one behind the pretty postcard views of national parks nor is it the glitzy high life of the big cities. It is smaller than this, more real and less attractive. In this, it reminds me a little of Olive Kitteridge in that you get the sense that you are seeing behind the brash, confident face that America chooses to present to the world and seeing something lless sure of itself. Nor is Alex a typical teenager. Alex is not defined by binary gender. There are upsetting scenes where Alex is badly bullied because of this and more tender scenes where Alex finds acceptance. Both are extremely well written.

The writing in this novel is outstanding, characters are well drawn and the issues touched on are important, serious one. Recommended.

I saw some really bad reviews of this book but I actually really enjoyed it! This isn't the type of book I'd usually enjoy as it is very character driven, slow and the characters were very unlikable but I don't know there was something enjoyable about this story!.

This is a story about a mother and daughter on who having a fight with her partner for the last times packs up and leaves and what follows in a road trip across the states, we get to learn more about the mother's past and the people who she has met a long the way. We also have Alex's (the daughter) story who is struggling to be away from her father and with life on the road. Some of the decisions the mother makes in this book are very selfish and in my opinion stupid but it didn't take the enjoyment out of this story.

Would I recommend this book? yes however I am well aware it's not for every one.

I enjoyed The Lauras and found it hard to put it down. The story is told from Alex's point of view and we are taken on a journey as they embark on a road trip running from Alex's father. Throughout the book I assumed Alex was a girl but now I'm not so sure. This doesn't effect the storyline or put you off reading it adds to the story.

13-year-old Alex’s mother is getting restless and tired of the endless arguments with Alex’s father. When she decides to take a road trip into her past, she takes Alex with her. As they travel together, the mother begins to share stories of her past. This is the first time that Alex feels the start of knowing anything about her.

I was very impressed by this author’s use of language in her first novel, “The Shore”, for which she won the Baileys Women’s Prize. She has again impressed me with her newest book, although I don’t feel it was quite as good as her first. That’s not to say that I don’t recommend it because I most definitely do recommend it. I just enjoyed the subject matter of “The Shore” a bit more. The author is very talented. This book is basically just a trip through the mother’s past that she opens up to her child as she tries to set right some past wrongs, visit old friends and find some healing. While there’s not a very complicated plot, the author makes it such an interesting read. I felt like I was sitting in the back seat and taking this road trip right along with them.

There was an interesting take on Alex. Alex could be a boy or Alex could be a girl. Alex isn’t telling. Alex doesn’t believe in gender and hasn’t quite decided which direction he/she will be headed. The sexual awakening of this young person is handled in a very realistic manner and yet quite sensitively.

Here’s an example of one of the literary finds in this book, though keep in mind that I read an ARC of the book and this may be changed in the final edition. “We were caught on the thin, hungry edge of the morning, before the sun sliced itself open on the horizon and bled out across the sky.” I really enjoy the writing style of this author and am already looking forward to her next book, which I hope will be soon.

Recommended.
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This book is about the teenage discoveries and coming of age of Alex. Alex's mother takes them away from Alex's father. There are so many characters in this book and a lot of unanswered questions. I felt that the story was rambling and jumbled in places.

“home for me was a place I was going to, rather than a place I could occupy” : A story of wanderings

Sara Taylor’s first novel, The Shore was a stunning debut, a collection of individual stories which were interweaving, deeply entangled exploring the history and geography of a small group of islands off the coast of Virginia, and the families and their descendants who marked the place, and were marked by it

So I was extremely interested (and with some trepidation) to read her ‘can you follow THAT – always a challenge when a debut writer sets a very high standard for themselves to meet again.

Well, I need not have worried. The Lauras is a very different book, but it is equally immersive, equally assured, equally wonderful.

“Out of the dark, foaming ocean a sun was rising, massive and red. It balanced on the black line of the horizon and spilled its blood across the sky, tore the scudding clouds with pink and caked the wet sand, and for a moment, I wondered if, in the course of my sleeping, we’d made it to the end of the world, where the sun rose out of the ocean like a newborn thing in the way I’d always imagined seeing but never had

“Where are we?” I asked

“Florida,” she said”

Taylor, originally from rural Virginia, clearly has a love of the landscape of her country, and this is evidenced in this book, effectively, a mother and child road trip. However, Taylor chose to complete her education in the UK, where she now lives, so she also brings that interesting outsider’s eye to her native country. Something being explored here, in many ways, is identity, and those who, in different ways, do not fit into the world which mainstream cultural thinking, and existing structures, have designed. Her interest is in misfits – which to some extent must mean almost all of us. Few are perfectly round pegs easily happy in perfectly round holes.

The mother in this story is clearly an outsider – child of Sicilian immigrants, she is not quite Sicilian, not quite American. Circumstances led to her having a wild, disrupted childhood, and she was fostered. The road trip is towards a journey back to her own past. She is married, with a thirteen year old child, but the marriage is foundering. Alex, the 13 year old is torn between whether to follow mother or father as the primary identity role model, as children of breaking marriages often can be. Ma rather takes matters into her own hands, following a particular row. She has been planning on escaping this marriage for some time, and has had hidden bags packed in readiness. Alex is scooped up in the middle of the night, without really knowing what is going on, and the two set out on a two year and more road trip, sometimes hunkering down so Alex’s schooling can continue, whilst Ma works at menial jobs. She is searching for some specific friends from childhood and young womanhood. Friends, and more than friends. Ma has a fluidity around her sexual orientation as well as her nationality and cultural identification. Coincidentally a few of the early significant friends were called Laura, so the name has acquired potency.

Ma and Alex are dependent on the kindness of strangers, at times, but are also at risk from the unkindness of others, and sometimes, they will have to be the ones offering kindness, or seeking to right wrongs and dispense rough justice

Narrator, now an adult, looking back some quarter of a century, is Alex, so the narrative voice is adolescence through the filter of maturity

“Memory is slippery, not even like a fish but like an eel, like an ice cube, like a clot of blood whose membranous skin can barely contain internal shifting liquidity. It’s something that, the firmer you try to grasp it, the weaker the hold you have on it, the less trustworthy it becomes. But it doesn’t matter what really happened, does it? Reality matters less than how it is perceived, that edge or feather or scale that you catch onto as it flickers by. And after a year or ten in a dingy pocket who can say if it was a lizard’s scale or a dragon’s in the first place?”

Unfortunately, so very much about this book might be spoiled for a reader if further information is given, yet I’m aware that a review this evasive or woolly might fail to lure a potential reader. I will have to err on the side of evasion. Like things are in this book for Alex, who does not know the destination Ma is heading for, it is the unknown journey – road, or book, which is the point. Naming, defining, holding out signposts for readers would be destructive

“Humans – most of us, at least – have the incapability of pondering the really terrifying things for any serious length of time. It’s probably what keeps us from throwing ourselves off cliffs in mass fits of existential crisis”

Taylor tells a wonderful story, and her writing of it is beautiful, crafted, sure.

I recommend this very strongly. I read it in digital version for review, from the publishers via NetGalley

I await Taylor’s next book with even higher hopes. Tremendous

This is an interesting book that I enjoyed but as a parent faintly disapproved of even as I enjoyed reading it (mainly the way the dad is basically edited out). Alex's mother seemingly out of the blue pack her into the car and starts a journey across country with no immediately apparent reason or goal in mind. The story becomes a narration of the main characters coming of age and a parallel exploration of her mothers past and quest to put to bed various events in her past. I've finished it now and I'm still not sure what I think of it which is in some ways a mark of this books quality. In summary absorbing and thought provoking with a touch of unsettling.

A road trip and rite of passage story where teenage Alex and Ma work their way across the USA in a 2 year time frame, dipping into Ma's past, resolving old conflicts and memories and making new ones.
. Intriguing, well crafted writing, I found this a fascinating peep at different social settings and life perspectives and the conundrum of Alex's gender was both fundamental and inconsequential in equal measure.
A read with a difference.

This is a fascinating book from an author that I did not know. I shall read more.
The story of a journey is narrated by Alex in the main. I was sure that Alex was a girl, other reviewers think maybe a boy. It is never explained, which of course adds to the mystery.
Alex and Mother leave home in a huge rush to , apparently, run away from Dad. The journey that they take covers realms of the mother's child/adulthood. Places where she has lived, people she has known, foster carers, the Lauras amongst them. She is straight talking and pulls no punches with Alex.
The story is written beautifully from both angles, you feel you understand the teenage angst of Alex, and yet you also empathise with Mother in her quest to find roots.
The last sentences of the book sum the whole up for me.
"I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't have to know. The road was beckoning and all I had to do was follow where it lead."
It's a book that I shall re-read.

I adored Taylor's last book, The Shore, and my expectations were high for this., The Lauras' as a result and I haven't been disappointed.

One of the authors strengths is her sense of place, writing about regional USA in a way that transcends its very ordinariness, making a truck stop compelling, a beach a place of sensual awakening for a character, Alex, whose gender is not clear to us.

After leaving home for a road trip of backwards reappraisal, Alex unfolds a map of her mothers to reveal annotations of her mother's past, from the foster homes she lived in to squats, to the people (Lauras) who made a deep impression upon her. As Alex and their mother weave their way from Virginia to Florida to the other places, Alex's own adolescence is framed within the context of their own mothers flight.

Ma’s response to a woman's questioning of whether someone can have no gender is emphatic:. “Well, Alex doesn’t … And there is nothing wrong with that. And that is the end of this conversation.” But there also has to be a squaring with a world not set up to nurture or understand this and at times Taylor's characters face violence and pain. This is to be expected, especially if one is female, or one is gender neutral and no amount of parenting can prevent this. Taylor manages to preserve the sense of restlessness in the novel without leaving the reader hanging at the end, unsatisfied. That takes some skill.

I couldn’t put The Lauras down. The story is told from Alex’s point of view and I could never make my mind up what gender Alex was but it doesn’t matter, in fact it adds to the story. Mum is one tough cookie who won’t settle for a life that she doesn’t want, no matter how hard the journey. I enjoyed ‘travelling’ with them to places that came to life through the writing which at times is exquisite. Descriptions so simple yet so powerful, took my breath away. It is a story about a journey that has a mission, a sort of coming of age for both parent and child and I loved it. New author to me and will certainly read more.

You have to be in the right place to read this I think; it doesn't do well with lots of 10 minutes sessions squeezed in around work and life, at least not for me as I kept dropping the thread of the story so often that when I finally realised the gender issues at play in the novel I was baffled because I guess I hadn't been paying enough attention.
The writing was succinct, often powerful, especially with the settings, though I never really warmed to the characters the way many readers seem to have.

When I picked this book I thought I had an idea about story. The title suggesting a book about a several Laura's, but it wasn't. It was a story about Alex a gender neutral kid who leaves his childhood home with his mother in the middle of the night and leaving his father behind. Again you expect the reasons for leaving to be the story - it's not. This book is a road trip of discovery for Alex learning more about his mothers past and how this shaped her present. both travel through various states meeting allies and foes with equal vigour all whilst Alex goes through the emotions of adolescence from child to adult. You see this trip both change mother and kid - bonding them in such a way that you realise they really are alike in many ways.
This book is full of twists and turns but you have a satisfied feeling at the end mixed with a little cabin fever of your own. It's definitely a good holiday read and would like to read more of Sara Taylor's work.

Thanks to Net Galley & Random House for an ARC of this book in exchange for a review.
From Virginia to California Ma & Alex ride. Sleeping in the truck, cheap motels and the occasional temporary apartment. Ma shares her own teenage stories and her friendship tales about the Laura's along the road.
It takes two years to reach their destination and they encounter some of Ma's past friends on their travels. Alex has a lot of time on her hands as Ma picks up jobs & works as many shifts as possible. Alex attends school during term times but struggles to fit in & struggles with gender and identity.
At their destination Alex had itchy feet and returns home to find Dad, but isn't long with Dad when the need to be on the road again sets in.
A story of travels, past & present experiences and finding oneself.

I started out really enjoying this road trip book. It built gently and subtlety. The trouble was I didn't really feel it developed into anything more. I was left with a lot of questions at the end of it. Having said that, it was beautifully written and, having read the reviews of Sara Taylor's 'The Shore', I'm keen to add this to my reading list.

This is an incredible book. It is one of those books where there is little action, but you are riveted from page one.
It is a book about coming of age, a road trip and the discovery that our parents are actually people too.
I loved the subplot about sexuality and gender. Throughout the book I assumed that Alex was a girl, but she (he?)refuses to be categorised as either a boy or a girl. By the end of the book I wondered whether I was wrong and Alex was in fact a boy - but then why does it matter? It doesn't.

The writing is excellent and the story of Alex' mother slowly comes out as they travel through the places of her past and we start to understand her through her interactions with a string of girls called Laura at different points in her life.
This unravelling is exquisitely done, and this is one of those novels that will stay with you for a long time.

Great book! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!