The Way Back Home is a collection of poems dealing with a wide range of emotions.

What I liked:
~Varied styles of poetry
~I love the cover and the few illustrations included
~I really identified with the poems dealing with grief
~The poems are grouped together by theme

What I didn't love
~some of the poems felt more essay like to me
~some lacked an emotional depth and felt more like it was aiming for inspirational without eliciting the other emotions needed first.

I would recommend reading this a few poems at a time and marking those that you'd like to come back to and read again. This is an easy collection to take what you need from as it offers a range of emotions and topics.

3.5/5 stars rounded up!

More of a collection of short prose interspersed with poems than a traditional poetry collection, 'The Way Back Home' is just as heartfelt and personal as all of Peppernell's works to date. She captures all the struggle, and love, and hope of navigating the uncertain times of the last few years with an epathetic voice that can be relatable to any reader, considering the globally spanning subject of this particular collection.

While I understand that Peppernell's "instagram poetry" style isn't necessarily for everyone, I also believe she's well established enough that readers ought to know more or less what they're getting into at this point.

Besides which, the beauty of poetry is in its proximation to more visual arts in that there is no "right" way to write a beautiful poem, and that all formats have the potential for soul and merit. If you like Courtney Peppernell's style, you will likely enjoy this collection. If it's not for you, then skip it, but I'm not interested in arguing the legitimacy of poetry format when it's entirely subjective.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this collection in exchange for an honest review.

I was absolutely thrilled to receive a review copy of The Way Back Home because I adore Peppernell's work. Like many other reviewers I had quite a bit of trouble getting the actual file to work properly on my devices, but the actual work was stunning, as always. I loved the openness of emotion as Peppernell reflected on experiences during lockdown and found it very relateable. Thank you!

THANK YOU to Andrews McMeel Publishing & NetGalley for sending me this ARC. All reviews are honest reflections of my own opinions, always.

With it's stunning cover, whimsical illustrations, & the promise of poetry & prose within, I was happy enough to take the time to explore this collection. Mostly thoughts & words of encouragement fill these pages, who's creation was sparked & formed by the pandemic we have all suffered through in many forms.

The book also touches on LGBTQ+ issues.

While I enjoyed bits of lines here & there, I cannot say this collection was altogether for me. Like many others I'm finding, I felt it bordered on self-help, contained little poetry (but lots of short story/prose), had a healthy does of repetition & something that felt along the lines of generic encouragement. Poetry is subjective, as with all reading, & I understand and respect that Peppernell's writing has had a deep abiding impact on many readers. Perhaps her other collection would be better suited to my personal reading tastes.

[arc review]
Thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.
The Way Back Home releases on August 23.

I recently read Pillow Thoughts volumes 1-4 and quickly came to love Courtney Peppernell's writing style, so I was very excited to have the opportunity to read this.

The Way Back Home takes inspiration from the '19 pandemic, and helps guide us as humans to essentially find our way back home (routines/familiarity), or to emerge from any obstacle that we might have found troubling or traumatic.

This is split into 8 components, all with the intentions of finding:
- courage
- support
- strength
- grace
- resilience
- love
- purpose
- faith

I think anyone would be able to benefit from parts of this poetry book, whether they apply meaning to the resurface from pandemic life or not.
While I did enjoy this, I found it to be more prose than poetry, and ultimately started to lose some interest along the way.


"The maple trees are shedding leaves, and I am reminded of the beauty in letting go.
The way the trees rustle and the leaves fall, and yet the branches remain.
Like shedding layers of skin, only our bones stay the same, like a house with no walls, but the structure is still in place..."

"But a forest is not a forest because of one tree. It is a forest because of many trees. We too are made up of many working parts—and together they carry us forward in life."

The Way Back Home captures the uncertainty of being exposed to a global pandemic. The author speaks of courage in all forms before, present, and (eventually) after our global crisis.

Through relatable words of wisdom, guidance, and suffering, Country Peppernell paints an elaborate and powerful picture of rising to find your courage as it is deeply rooted in your heart and flows throughout you. She tells you that you just need to find it.

The author guides you through thoughts that everyone was seemingly having around the same time when the world inevitably shut down and began its societal reset. After the slow release back into society, she starts to give you treats of acceptance and longing for the future to be known through beautiful words from the heart, the home of courage.

Thank you, Net Galley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing me with an ARC of Courtney Peppernell’s “The Way Back Home” in exchange for my honest review and opinions.

Thank you Netgalley for the advance reader copy of The Way Back Home by Courtney Peppernell in exchange for an honest review. I am really glad that I was able to download this book. It was a beautifully written book of poetry about love, loss, courage and hope. It really struck a chord within me and I kept reading it to people and sharing how poignant the words were.

The illustrations in this poetry book are super cute. I VERY much enjoyed how it was split into sections with building a house as a metaphor.

The book is just too long for a poetry book. There are reflections before and after each poem and that really stretches the book out and gets tedious. These stories could almost be a whole separate book. I wish they were just at the beginning of each chapter instead. Some of the themes of a section were overused enough to sound repetitive, especially for "courage". I would have liked the poet to convey some of these ideas without repeating the same word time and again.

The poetry itself isn't bad :) I just personally would have loved more of the illustrations and house building theme with less of the reflections throughout.

This just didn't work for me. Which was sad because some of these poems were actually good. Still, for the most part, it felt less like a “redemptive journey” and more like being a removed spectator to someone else's, or rather more frankly, like I was nosing through someone's diary where they recounted the experience. That is, I could not relate. The title and synopsis gave me the impression of it being some profound self-discovery journey on the way to healing, but then I came out disappointed. Even universal themes like loneliness and self-doubt did not quite hit home for me with all the overly specific descriptions.

This poetry collection was not for me. I did not really connect with the work or most of the metaphors this time around. One thing about covid is I’m exhausted with hearing and reading about it and this work talks about it some more without really adding any new perspective so I found it tedious to read any covid-related poems. I also felt that sometimes the sections started to feel a little repetitive. But thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for making this book available to review.

Thank you to NetGally and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the ARC and opertunity to review this book of poetry.

I believe poetry should be viewed through a very personal lens given its purpose as art is to evoke emotion. I have always struggled with reviewers rating a work down because they didn't connect with it. That just means the art was not for you at the time you read it. This book of poetry found me exactly when I needed it to. The current trials I'm navigating have me feeling lost, overwhelmed, alone, critical of myself, and fearful. I feel like I'm trying to find a way through the pain and trauma and long to feel like myself again. This work is about finding your way back to that place of comfort that home brings. It's about the journey we need to take to get back to being in a place where we can shed off the weight of our trials and troubles and be in that lightness of a place that offers shelter and protection. I found myself reflected back like a mirror in so many of the poems. I felt all the emotions deeply as I read each piece and kept feeling like it had been written for me.

Poetry is the painting of the literary world. The words form images as you read and leave impressions on your heart. Pepperell painted this beautifully and I think it captured so much more than a post COVID world. It opens windows to those scars we earned having fought through dark days, surviving beginnings we weren't ready to explore, and unrequested endings when we thought we were in the middle still. And it weaves those scars with gracefully tattooed beauty in the reminders to make room for love, cultivate courage, and celebrate the everyday magic.

I think the biggest problem with this collection were my inappropriate expectations. While I wanted to read something like The Space Between Us, my favourite Courtney's work to date, this reminded me more of I Hope You Stay and Watering The Soul, both of which I didn't enjoy that much. It's written in extremely similar writing style, and now it's becoming quite obvious that it just doesn't work for me.

I feel really indifferent about most of the stuff I read, and I even found myself skimming some parts. The mostly prose format was also tiring, because I prefer classic poetry compared to this writing style. However, I will still be checking out Courtney's new releases, as well as some backlist titles I missed. But overall, I could have done without this one.

Thanks to the Netgalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing me with eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was expecting more. For first the experience of reading was not worth it, it took me around 3 days to even open up and read this one. Second of all Adobe is not a program that's suited good for reading on. There you have two of the main issues.

About the poetry it was good, it's set under the pandemic and goes through loss, loneliness, sadness. Those were the ones I focused more of. This was an okey read, I've read better from Courtney Peppernell

I was so excited about the "coming home" aspect of this book. I thought it was going to be so soul deep and inspiring.

The part I was able to read had too much covid and sad break up/lost love entries for me. We are so much more than that. And it was too dreary for my mental health at this current time.

However, I can't give a fair rating or review because, as with almost every other reviewer, it was very difficult to read this book. It kept freezing and crashing my device. In the end it was impossible to read it fully.

"The Way Back Home" by Courtney Peppernell was a beautiful collection of poetry that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The poems were set during the Covid 19 pandemic and it brought about a certain flow of emotion and I found myself very immersed in each poem. I love poetry and this collection was truly spectacular for fans of poetry. I believe that people who may not be a fan of poetry will greatly enjoy the collection.

The format that the publisher provided this arc in was exceptionally difficult to access which was the main downfall of my experience with this piece.

Thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for this eARC!

The Way Back Home is a poetry collection that thematizes the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasizes themes of loss, grace, friendship, as well as touching on LGBT issues. While all of the above surely is relatable to the 2022 reader, the poems at times fall flat or feel like out of a self-help book (not bad necessarily, just not what one would usually expect out of a collection of poems). It was an average read.

Comparing Courtney’s first ‘poetry’ collection to this, there is a clear improvement, no more ‘poems’ that are made up of five words. Yet, I think it’s still very similar. Themes and writing style are still the same.
I do believe calling it a poetry collection is being generous, it’s not really poetry, it’s prose. most of the poems, rather than the solid blocks of words in a paragraph, are still a few sentences with line breaks added randomly.

If you enjoy Courtney’s previous work and if you like insta poetry, this would be suited for you.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read this book!

I gave up at the 20% mark of the book. Firstly, the adobe digital editions reading experience is horrible and I'm surprised the publisher chose to go for this format when you can share the book on the NetGalley app.

Secondly, the poetry just did not mean anything to me. The first few poems on courage just bored me and I didn't want to finish this book.

I wanted to read this book, but it was not supported by the NetGalley Shelf App like all other books I’ve read from this publisher.

The Way Back Home is a collection of poems relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasizes themes of loss, grace, friendship, and more. Peppernell executes this theme well, but I found the book to be an average read. Nothing really stood out to me for better or for worse (other than its simplicity and mundaneness). A good read, but nothing extraordinary.