This woman called r o I s e was very interesting. She had A full life in new york city as a journalist. She also worked bars when this profession do not pay. She had a very interesting life. She moved to brooklyn. There she met her husband named frank. They had a good life together but he got sick and they were separated. The canebag because of this. Her mother had a lot of problems as well. Her father left her and her mother when she was fifteen. She found Peace in the woods or the ocean. She had a lot of ups and downs in her twenties. She went to ireland when frank died. Then she went up to northern ireland as well. She came back to New York for a while.But she really longed to Back To L r e l a n d. She met a lot of people there and a man named mark. She went back in two thousand nineteen for the course up there college. She went back to a village called
Gle n. A r n. There was a famous castle there as well and a forest. She met.
People there and she felt comfortable there. Then mark and her fell in love. This was like a love story and a woman trying to find out who she l Was. The title was interesting too because of explained , northern ireland. There were some history in this book as well.

Rosie Schaap had a solid career as a journalist and a life that looked to others like nonstop fun: all drinking and dining and traveling to beautiful places—and getting paid to write about it. But under the surface she was reeling from the loss of her husband and her mother—who died just one year apart. Caring for them had claimed much of her daily life in her late thirties. Mourning them would take longer.

It wasn’t until a reporting trip took her to the Northern Irish countryside that Rosie found a partner to heal with: Glenarm, a quiet, seaside village in County Antrim. That first visit made such an impression she returned to make a life. This unlikely place—in a small, tough country mainly associated with sectarian strife—gave her a measure of peace that had seemed impossible elsewhere.

What a unique, beautifully written journey through grief to a new beginning. Having lost my fiancé young, nearly 19 years ago now, and having recently lost my father, this book came into my hands at the perfect time to be a balm for my soul. I loved how Schaap wove history into the story. Highly recommend this!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced digital reader's copy (ARC) in exchange for an honest review!

This memoir effectively describes grieving and mourning. The author becomes a widow far too young and decides to move to Ireland and go back to school. She also is dealing with the loss of her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship and which makes these passages relatable. She finds love and a sense of peace in the end but still goes through the ebbs and flows of grief and guilt. The writing is beautiful and meditative in its descriptions. I enjoyed hearing about her new found friends in Ireland and the rhythms of her daily life and the life of the village. She and her partner become bird watchers in their yard during the Covid pandemic - and I particularly liked her naming her favorites and finding comfort in watching their behaviors. An interesting and thoughtful book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Mariner Books for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.

I enjoyed this memoir about how Rosie found a place to live and love. Rosie Schapp was grieving the loss of her husband and mother. During her travels for her writing career she comes across a village in Ireland. The story tells the reader why she fell in love and how it helped her heal. I appreicated her honest insight into her grief.

The memoir gives us a lot of glimpses of other places she has visited and how she felt about those places. Some quite personal. I really enjoyed reading about all those places and the churches, pubs and different places she would pop in. She was a traveler not a tourist. The history and insight woven into the story made it stand out. Thank you Netgalley for the chance to review this book.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of The Slow Road North in exchange for an honest review!

I went into this book not entirely knowing what to expect, all I knew was I had recently visited Northern Ireland and was definitely interested in reading more about it. I was very pleasantly surprised by the thoughtful examination of Northern Irelands people and places, as well as her honesty as she explored her grief and walked through the various stages of her life since the death of her husband and then her mother.
I resonated with many of the things she shared about grief and relationships while also not agreeing with her beliefs about elements of the grieving process and relationships.
I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a thoughtful memoir and reflection on grief and new beginnings.

Thank you NetGalley and Mariner Books for this ARC!

I restarted this book 3 times before I was able to get through more than 5 pages. This book was very confronting for me on a personal level. I'm not even sure I'm able to review and rate this book in a fair way because I had such an intense reaction to it. There were a lot of weird parallels, kind of when you meet someone new and realize you've lived in the same places at the same times, enjoy the same things, have had the same experiences, and the way you saw/processed these experiences is also very similar. Again, the word I keep coming back to is just *intense*. I can't really say I'd recommend this book to anyone else; I can't really say this book was good or bad or enjoyable or unenjoyable. It was just a very intense reading experience. Not the best review I've ever written, I apologize, but unfortunately, that's all I've got.

In this heartfelt and deeply moving memoir, Rosie Schaap finds grace in an unlikely place. Recently widowed and also mourning the loss of her mother, she finds herself drawn to Glenarm, a small village in Northern Ireland she had visited before. There, she experiences the uniquely Irish approach to death, grieving, and perhaps not moving on so quickly. As in her previous memoir DRINKING WITH MEN (2013), Schaap writes evocatively in a manner that frequently catches you off-guard with its emotion. But this book is as much about life as death, the turns in that slow road leading to unexpected destinations: happiness, fulfillment, renewal. Brimming with humor and wisdom, it's a journey worth taking.

Book: The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country
Author: Rosie Schaap
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Places Featured: Glenarm, Northern Ireland
Review Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2 (rounded up)
Review: The Slow Road North is a slow book and I admit, it took me a bit to get into it. Rosie Schaap is a writer going through two of the hardest things a person can deal with: the unexpected loss of her husband and the loss of her mother. Her emotions and grief are rampant and she's searching for solace...and she, somewhat surprisingly, finds it in the comfort of a small village in Northern Ireland, Glenarm. Schaap is very literary, very intelltectual, and very lyrical, but once you do get used to the style, it's a beautiful book with honesty, great descriptions, and, ultimately, hope.

Love this. Will give a better review at a later date but definitely 4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️s.. thank you NetGalley for this opportunity. Rosie Schaap for writing a fabulous book.

Thank you to Net Galley and Harper Collins Publishing for an early copy of The Slow Road North by Rosie Schaap

It doesn't happen often, but I was fortunate enough to obtain both text and audio at the same time for The Slow Road North, and the sincerity and passion in the author's words is, ironically perhaps, a soothing respite in a country where where war and strife have been a part of daily life over and over through generations.

Author Rosie Schaap, living in New York, is widowed while in her 40s. Thirteen months into widowhood she loses her mother as well. Dealing with her twin griefs has been difficult at best. Rosie decides to make a move to a small town near Belfast, Northern Ireland as she had attended a nearby college and wanted to return to Ireland. It is in this quiet town, Glenarm, that she will laugh, cry, fall in love with local birds, make new friends and find new love. The road she is on is not an easy one, but she finds comfort in poetry and in writing.

Rosie Schaap shares local information about Northern Ire;and including the historic event of a local Catholic school finally admitting students of other faiths, particularly Protestants, which had not been done before. Many references to "The Troubles" (Catholics vs. Protestants in a country now divided) give Rosie's new life added scope as she celebrates the idea of community.

The Slow Road North is an uplifting and intuitive examination of what life can be and is not a "How To Survive Widowhood" guidebook. Rather, The Slow Road North is one woman's story of new opportunities.

I have a soft spot for Ireland and Northern Ireland, so when I had the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this memoir, I didn't hesitate. And, it didn't disappoint. This is a story of grief and how we all handle it differently, but also how the Irish, and particularly those in the North, have an intimate (dare I say, also healthier?) connection and experience with it.

The author must deal with many losses in a relatively short period of time and finds a partial antidote in the small town of Glenarm, on the Antrim Coast, north of Belfast. She writes with honesty and a good deal of humor about her life in NYC, as well as her initial visit and subsequent move to Glenarm, a place she clearly loves. The strong sense of place (forest and ocean 10 minutes apart? sign me up!) and the visceral anecdotes about the people she comes to know and love along the way (including her pandemic experiences), create an unmistakably personal, but also universally understood exploration of community, grief and the human condition.

Please note: I received a digital ARC from Netgalley & Mariner Books in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are strictly my own.

I originally thought this books would be just an autobiography, a la A Taste of Provenance, but it isn't. While there are shades of that, mainly it is a book about grief, about learning to let go of what binds us, and being willing to experience the new. The book explores how Schaap let go of her grief, thanks to staying in a remote village and finding new friends and a place to call home. When she returns, she immerses herself into the village and finds a new life, and comes to understand her grief and starts her new life. It's a different type of book- less entertaining, more resource (though there are entertaining bits). if you have someone who is ealing with grief, this might be a good book for them.

Schaap's story is a memoir of her grief over becoming widowed and moving to Northern Ireland from New York City. As she rebuilds her life and seeks out new communities and a renewed focus on her writing, she takes readers through an exploration of grief and healing. As other reviews have noted, this book moves at a slower pace, but it feels authentic to Schaap's journey. Schapp has a strong and poetic writing style that highlights her journey and resists easy conclusions or cliches about the grieving process.

The Slow Road North is a thoughtful and elegant memoir about navigating grief. As a young widow myself this book hit on many hard truths of widowhood. I loved it and will recommend to others.

This is the second book I've read recently by a Rosie with an Ireland connection, which feels like a nice coincidence. Very different stories, but with some other odd coincidences: In "A Rosie Life in Italy", the author describes leaving Ireland for Italy in part to escape grief...while in "The Slow Road North", the author describes leaving New York for Northern Ireland, in part to escape grief.

"He was not one of those people who say they are ready for death. Can those people be serious? There were still too many books Frank wanted to read." (loc. 99*)

I say 'escape grief', but that's not right: Schaap moved to a village in Northern Ireland after her husband got ill and died, far too young, and after her mother too died, but she did not move to escape grief—she needed to be able to fully process her grief in a way that she was unable to do in New York, with its fast pace and all its ghosts. New York was home. But sometimes home is not enough. In Glenarm, she sought a new kind of life: a degree in writing, a new community, people who did not shy away from grief or pain but accepted them as part of life. And she learned a great deal: about the Troubles, and the rifts that remained in Glenarm, even if they were quieter than before; it's fascinating to read about her experience being Jewish in a place that was for so long split between Protestant and Catholic, with little thought given to people who might fall outside those categories.

Schaap talks a little about the choice of the title for the book, but it feels right: it's a fairly understated book, with measured peaks and lows rather than crashing ones, despite the grief and loss that underpin the story. Character-driven, if you will; it's well into the book before Schaap gets into her relationship with her mother and who her mother was as a person, and it's a wise choice, because Schaap's mother was clearly nothing if not a complicated person, but that's allowed to come second to love.

"When Frank died and my mother was too unwell to come to the funeral, I asked her to promise me that she wouldn't die that year, too. She made me that promise and she kept it. She died one year and thirteen days after Frank." (2414)

(That line low-key devastated me; there was a while when it looked like I'd lose both my parents within a year—I did not; my mother is back to her extremely energetic self—and while it's absolutely a different scenario, I get how terrifying the prospect of losing two loved ones so close together is. I've already moved away from my parents, but I can well imagine picking up my whole life and restarting after so devastating a loss.)

This is one for readers who are in it for character and rumination and the slow road north through grief. It's a lovely take.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country
by Rosie Schaap

Memoir ~ Northern Ireland ~ Love ~ Loss ~ Grief ~ Second chances ~ Family ~ New beginnings ~ Beautifully written ~ Highly recommended

Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books for this ARC; all opinions are my own.

The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country is a bold entry into memoirs grappling with grief and place; Rosie Schaap seeks out Glenarm, a seaside Irish town, to discover her grief. She intends to mourn fully and well the deaths of her husband and her mother, to resume that which the unrelenting pace of life had interrupted.

Schaap does find the space, people, culture and artistic traditions to develop new understandings and rich, heartfelt expressions of grief and remembrance. Regularly Schaap offers a descriptive phrase, a weighty paragraph, or a gob smacking movement of clarity worthy of the literary greats (Irish and otherwise) she invokes.

Cliché and projection can haunt spiritual expeditions. Some forest walks and birdwatching respites unfold cloyingly, but moments of grief and grace evade mere romanticism. Schaap forms relationships with distinct people who have their own sense of history, and perspective on love, loss, and – saliently, – widowhood. Schaap is also sharply self- aware; she understands her place as a newcomer and presents conclusions amenable to revision. She explores some tensions that are still unresolved: reverberations of intrra-Christian conflict, population declines, and pandemic challenges. These reflections culminate in camaraderie, and glimmers of a future.

Grief sometimes requires us to seek new contexts and new relationships to fully render its mystery. For most of us, that will not result in personal and professional relocation to Ireland, but we can still find ourselves in the striving, in love remembered and renewed. The Slow Road North is worth the trip.

I received a free copy of, The Slow Road North, by Rosie Schaap. from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Rosie Schaap is a journalist, battling through grief who came to Glenarm, in County Antrim. Ireland, to write a story, and fell in love with the location. Rosie decides to move from New York to Glenarm permanently. I enjoyed this book, I love most books about Ireland, and this is a good one.

The Slow Road North was, for me, a bit slow. I love a good memoir and was certainly drawn to the setting, but found myself skimming through this at times. It was a slow moving book that was quite beautiful, but I was craving more.
This author is a fantastic weaver of words. She paints a picture of her surroundings that is immersive. Her characters are colorful. The title is even compelling. This is a well done book.
Just don't expect to rush through it. It is indeed a meandering book, as others have stated.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Mariner books for this ARC of The Slow Road North.

A thoughtful, engaging story of “going home” to Northern Ireland in the midst of tumultuous upheaval - economic, personal, and world-changing - told through the eyes of the newly widowed and bereft narrator. As time moves on, she learns to adjust with the help of a community that surrounds her with acceptance and understanding, enabling her inner wounds to heal from the outside in.