This one was pretty good. I liked the characters. Liked the premise of the story. Love the title. Sorry for the short review, I read it a while ago and forgot to review right away!

Douglas Westerbeke had not been on my radar before this book, but he definitely is now. I'm going to have to check out all of his other works as this was a whimsical and thought provoking ride.

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review.

Through a series of mysterious events Aubry Tourvel finds herself with a disease that will kill her unless she continues to travel and thus begins the adventure of a lifetime.

Although Douglas Westerbeke has sought in this case to write a page turner of an adventure story for adults I still found this read like a young adult novel. The few adult themes imo did not add much to the story and if left out would make this a great novel for younger readers. I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t enjoy it, because I very much did but I felt it was missing something that would make me feel it was adult fiction. Although it was stated clearly that Aubry was grown up I found myself continuing to picture her as the young child she’d been when she was first inflicted by the disease.

The adventure this story describes is incredible and wondrous and a feast for the imagination. I actually think, as someone who learned geography playing where in the world is Carmen sandiego that this story would make an excellent video game for kids that would be an incredible adventure game and an opportunity to learn more about geography and famous landmarks at the same time.

If you’re looking to escape the adult world, be a kid or young and heart again and are keen to travel the world through the stories of another, this book is for you.

This book was a 3.5 for me. I have a lot of feelings on this one.. and mostly they are sad. This is described as having Addie Larue vibes and I definitely agree with that label and honestly felt a lot of the same feelings.

We follow Aubry who comes down with a mysterious ailment that prevents her from staying in one place for too long nor does it allow her to revisit the same place twice. If she does she will die and in a gruesome painful way. So she has no choice but to journey the world. She visits untouched places and sees things that you'd never believe were real unless you see it. And while this has its fulfilling moments it also comes at a cost. She is alone.

Constantly outrunning your death doesn't allow for meaningful relationships or companionship. She meets friends and lovers a long the way but it can never last.

Overall this was a really interesting story and I did really love the concept. I do wish the "why" was flushed out a bit more. Why was she the only one afflicted with this illness? I enjoyed the magical realism but I felt that I needed more explanation.

Overall a very interesting but somewhat heartbreaking story for me.

this started off so strong reminding me of Addie Larue, but it lost some steam around the middle. i still enjoyed but it was 3 stars for me.

This one follows Aubry Tourvel, a lady who happens to have a disease that kills her if she stays in the same place for more then 2 days. This means that she is constantly moving - creating so many different stories and connections she's made through her journey of staying alive (and seeing the world in the process).

Best quote:
"There was no retracing her steps. Once she had been, there was no way back. Every departure irreversible."

This was such a unique story. I breezed through the first 75% but then at the end it kind of lost me. I didn't enjoy the end and felt like it happened so quickly compared the rest of the book. I gave it an overall 2/5 stars. I feel like it had so much potential and it just didn’t reach where i needed it to be.

I enjoyed this book. Written by a librarian of course we've got to support the librarians.

This was a slow paced book, that was quite repetitive. But I think that was because the same things happen to her every 1-4 days. So i guess that just goes with the novel. I enjoyed reading about the travel aspect and the descriptions were so beautiful, I almost felt like I was there.

Also I want to note that I typically don't enjoy books where the MC is female and written by a male. This MC was so well done, it was almost as if a woman wrote it. I was so impressed with how the author wrote this novel and will be waiting for their next book.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World was certainly an interesting read. This novel was outside of my typical read, but I really enjoyed the adventure aspect of it. The story left me both heart-broken and joyful at different points in Aubrey Tourvel's journey around the world. Aubrey spends her life in constant motion after a 'disease' she gets at age 9, prevents her from staying in any one place for more than a few days. As Aubrey outruns the disease day by day, she journeys to all lengths of the Earth and experiences living in deserts, jungles, mountains and more. My only wish is that there had been more answers than what we were given.
Overall, a very unique read for me, and well worth the time.

Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book had a really interesting premise. Aubrey can't stay in one place more than a few days without getting really sick. The book follows her around the world - showing the interactions with the people she meets, a magical library and strange happenings. It was weird but beautiful. I enjoyed it.

It's like a travel journal written in a story. Aubry's journey throughout and the valuable experiences she encountered made this story relatable and can read in any time of the day or season.

3.6/5 stars

Like the best old adventure tales from times gone by. Like the best children’s adventures that take you someplace completely different from all you’ve ever known. Like The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman and those in Erin MorganStern's Starless Sea. At times it's like being lost in Khazad-dum, the lost underground city except that all the monsters in this one are on the outside.

This book is part Amelie and part Indiana Jones.

Aubrey is a wanderer, subject to illness and violent seizures and ultimately death if she stays in one place too long. But the existence of the libraries, whose doors appear whenever she has wandered (or been chased) into a dead end, implies she is not the only wanderer. Sometimes she hears distant voices, or footsteps.

This is only one of the mysteries that drew me through this fascinating tale. Her story is not linear. It is meditative, episodic, a travelogue as much as a philosophical journey.

Go in with no expectations and open to wherever the wandering takes you.

Beautiful!

The story begins in Paris in 1885 where we meet a nine-year-old Aubry Tourvel. She lives with her parents and two sisters and is known as the spoilt younger child. All that changes right after she finds a puzzle ball and she opts out of sacrificing it. Days later Aubry starts bleeding from the eyes, the nose, the lips, and the ears, she's bleeding to death. In an attempt to save her, her parents take her to the local doctor, but once she gets there she's fine, but it starts up again when she goes back home. No one is sure what illness Aubry has but one thing is clear, she must move to stay alive. This is where her journey across the world starts. Aubry cannot stay in one place for more than three days at a time or even go back to where she has already been without bleeding to death. We get to follow her on her journey of survival and wonder.

Douglas Westerbeke did a wonderful job of sucking the reader in and keeping us invested. This is definitely an author worth keeping an eye out for.


Thank you to Douglas Westerbeke, Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for the digital ARC provided through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

It's Paris 1885 and nine year old Aubry Tourvel finds a puzzle ball coming home from school. She tosses it into a well only for it to reappear. Days later she starts to bleed to death. This starts her journey across the globe. Aubry cannot stay in one place for an extended amount of time or retrace her step without bleeding to death. We follow her on her wanderings as she learns how to survive and live with this strange affliction.
Reminiscent of The Midnight Library and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a story of discovery and survival. The story was well told with interesting characters that Aubry meets. Douglas Westerbeke brings you on a fascinating journey.

I loved this book, I have been recommending it to everyone. It is such a walk through geography and history with some magical realism thrown in, a few love stories and, finally, a happy ending, what more could you want?

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: It is the year 1885 and you are a nine-year-old girl living in Paris, France. One day, you start bleeding from the eyes, the nose, the lips, and the ears. You walk a little way away and the bleeding stops. However, if you return to the site where this sickness took hold, you will begin to bleed all over again. The only way to stay well is to keep moving. If you stop in one place for more than three days, you will start dying again. If you return to a place where you had been before, you, too, will start bleeding all over again. Thus, the only cure for this mysterious ailment is to keep walking and keep moving. A life lived like this means a life without much in the way of constant companions, but you do get to see the world. Would you like to live a life like this? You can if you escape into the pages of Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World. It’s the story of Aubry Tourvel’s life on the run and the people she (briefly) meets on the way.

This novel is about two things, I suppose: what it’s like to be a woman and what it’s like to be immersed in a life of solitude and reading. When it comes to the “being a woman” angle, Tourvel’s bleeding is reminiscent of menstruation — though a much more rapid cycle of that. In a sense then, the book is about the turmoil that a woman must go through, though I suppose this position falls apart when it comes to motherhood in a way because Tourvel doesn’t stay long enough with one person to have a chance of settling down. (Though I must admit, motherhood eventually does play a role in the plot at the very end of this work.) To wit, the book is being marketed as a female Indiana Jones-type story, a tale where a woman gets to have an adventure, though at a personal cost. When it comes to reading, A Short Walk Through a Wide World sometimes has Tourvel encounter libraries inside the earth that act as shortcuts across inhospitable deserts and immense oceans. It’s here where the novel takes on even more of a fabulist bent and suffers for it by relegating Tourvel’s illness to the realms of fantasy or science fiction. (I know, I know. The illness itself is pretty fantastic, but the book is unsure of its literary ambitions.)

Still, one can easily get carried away and lost in this work. For one thing, if you’re tired of one aspect of the story, you can keep reading because something is bound to change in a few pages as Tourvel must move on and go to another part of her unexplored earth. For another, this is a bit of a swashbuckler on land as Tourvel learns to survive in the wilderness, including the jungles of Africa and South America and the wilds of northern Canada. However, the novel does falter when it tries to explain away the fact that Tourvel is running into numerous other languages (which the book messily tries to get around the fact by making Tourvel a little too inclined to pick up new languages quickly, even though they may be way different than French — such as the case when she’s visiting the Far East). And the underground libraries aspect of the book is a weak spot. Though Tourvel learns to tell her own story in these places, it seems redundant as she has newspaper reporters following her — which is another blight in that just about everyone she meets is aware of her, even in the pre-Internet times of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Did everyone read the newspaper and follow the news closely back then?

Still, A Short Walk Thorough a Wide World is a captivating read. It’s entertaining enough, even during its boring bits, and you have to admire the author’s sense of adventurousness. (Incidentally, the author works in one of the U.S.’s largest libraries and sits on a panel of a prestigious writing award, the International Dublin Literary Award.) There’s a lot of love about this captivating read, and it’s enjoyable trying to figure out the puzzle pieces of what Westerbeke is trying to say with this work. While the book does paint itself into a bit of a corner by its end, and Westerbeke has to introduce more and more fantastic elements to the work for it to not go on for perpetuity, if you turn your brain off for a bit, this is an enjoyable ride. I’m not the only one who has felt this way. The book has been out for a couple of weeks now but is already something of a bestseller in America. Thus, it looks like A Short Walk Through a Wide World marks the promising debut of a writer we’re probably going to hear more of in the years to come. While it is not quite a superlative work, it is intriguing and sometimes fascinating and Westerbeke knows how to tell a gripping adventure yarn for the most part. Just be aware that there’s a fair amount of bloodletting, and it may or may not be referential to something else entirely. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, so be sure to dig in and enjoy the escapism that’s on offer here. It’s pretty good, if not entirely great, and is worth wasting the few hours it will take to plow through this.

Aubry is a spoiled and stubborn nine year old girl in Paris, 1885, when she comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses the ball over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, she starts to bleed to death at the dinner table. When medical treatment only seems to make her worse, Aubry flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that the act of moving is what keeps her alive. This is the beginning of a lifelong journey with a condition that won't let her stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place she's already been. The more Aubry learns about what it takes to survive, the more desperate she becomes to share her life with others.

A SHORT WALK THROUGH A WIDE WORLD is a story with an interesting premise and is very well-written. I loved getting to know Aubry while following her travels across the world. Aubry is a character who is fierce and independent, but also hopeful and yearning for a caring touch and a home. She is brave, resilient, strong, and never defeated by her endless wandering. This is a story that spans many years and is flush with impeccable details and imagery, paired with whimsical storytelling. There are many chapters following Aubry while she is alone, but my favourite chapters are when she is with another person. While the chapters where Aubry is alone highlight her loneliness, the chapters where she is with another character highlight the need for human connection and shows how it benefited her during her travels.

The pacing of this story is on the slower side, but curiosity about the puzzle ball, Aubry's sickness, and where her travels would take her next held my interest and kept me coming back for more. I enjoyed the adventure and magical realism aspects of the story which were well integrated. I think more explanation and expansion upon the puzzle ball and the sickness before the travel began would have been beneficial to the story. Overall, an excellent debut!

<i>I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher, Avid Reader Press, of this advanced digital copy for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an honest review! All opinions shared are my own.</i>

Nine year old Aubry comes across a wooden puzzle ball in 1885 Paris, that won’t leave her side. A few days later she starts to suddenly bleed to death and no medical treatment can help her. The only thing that works is movement, so she leaves home and family and embarks on the most epic journey around the world (multiple times). I really enjoyed following Aubry on her walking adventures, especially the unique people she meets along the way. There were some fantastical parts in the book that did drag on for me. Otherwise, the story moved along at a good pace, never boring me. The story makes you re-evaluate whether spending years traveling around the world is actually worth it.

I accidentally requested an ARC for this book from Netgalley and pleasantly surprised I did.

This book was very interesting, Aubry finds a puzzle ball when she was young and everything changed. She could no longer stay in any place for more than three days or she would bleed to death. At a very young age she is left alone to wander the world and see things no one else has ever seen. She finds love only to lose it, she finds friends only to leave them behind. The libraries she wandered through were wonderful and took her from one place to another. I have never read a book like this, it was enjoyable and interesting. Always kept you wondering where she would end up or who she would meet. I would recommend this book. I received a book from Net Gallery and the views and opinions are my own.

This book is perfect for anyone who loves adventure. <3
I have to say, I love knowing this was written by a librarian!
Following Aubrey’s journey gave me all of the emotions. It reminded me a bit of invisible life of addie larue with a starless sea here and there! vibes are immaculate.

2.5/5, rounded down. This read like a really promising draft. Unfortunately, so much of this book was really half-baked and superficial. Loads of chapters that were little more than "here's another thing that happened!" without really developing the characters or advancing the story. Lots of moments where I felt like the author thought he was saying something really clever, or witty, or profound, or insightful, and he really wasn't. The author made choices that didn't make sense to me (like why did he choose to make the main character French when the book is written in English? Whole conversations between characters speaking French to one another, but I'm reading them in English). I didn't find the ending satisfying at all. I'm not really sure what he was trying to say with this book, or if he was trying to say anything at all. What am I meant to take away from this? My overall impression was that this just went on and on and I found it a bit of a slog to get through, unfortunately.