Beautiful writing style and I loved the Canadian references however I found the pacing to be rather slow. I wanted to skim at parts to get to the mystery. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

“Because when they grow up, your kids, they are different. Growing up is, in its way, a little bit like a death. Your kid is two people: the one that belongs to you, needs you, and the one that does not.” - Sarah Leipciger. 💜💜💜💜💜 Thank you @netgalley and @penguinrandomca for the digital advanced readers copy of “Moon Road” by Sarah Leipciger. This is hands down one of the best books I’ve read this year. I don’t know if a small review can do justice to the verbal work of art that Sarah has spun. She is a linguistic wizard and her ability to narrate a story with so much beauty and imagery is unmatched. When I wasn’t reading this book I couldn’t get back to it fast enough. This is a book that will stick with me. It’s tragic, and beautiful and full of life and death and grief. So many times I felt like I was Kathleen or I was Yannick or I was Una, not that I was just reading about them but I was actually experiencing their pain and their joy right along side them. Do yourself a favour and read “Moon Road” and I know I will be reading more by this author very shortly.

3.5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Canada for this powerful, sensitively written book by Sarah Leipciger, which will be published on August 27. It contemplates grief, loss, and profound suffering written in lyrical, descriptive language, evoking disconnection, hope for closure and understanding.

Kathleen and Yannick were a married couple but divorced after their daughter Una disappeared 22 years ago. They remained friends, but after a significant blowup where Kathleen violently attacked Yannick, he left the home. They haven't spoken for 19 years.

This character-driven story treats Kathleen with sympathy, but I found her unlikeable. She is independent, runs a flower business, and marks off the days since Una went missing (now over 7900)). Each year, she hosts a Una Awareness party. The latest party is described. She is short-tempered, rude to friends trying to help, and self-centred and demanding. This party seems more creepy and destructive than a tribute to her daughter's memory. She realizes her words and behaviour were unpleasant but will never apologize. I had to wonder how much her personality was due to her profound loss or if she had always been that way, resulting in Una leaving home.

Yannick has been unsettled and always looking for new relationships and love. He is a quiet man who hides anger and grief. He has been remarried a couple of times and has four children. Kathleen was tolerant of his sons but hostile when his ex-wife gave birth to a girl. Kathleen is now in her mid-60s, and Yannick is entering his 70s. Shde unexpectedly hears from Yannick after all these years of silence. He is feeling his age from backaches and mobility issues. She is in pain from an extracted tooth and not following the dentist's advice.

He wants Kathleen to accompany him from Ontario to BC, 2500 miles in his rickety old truck. Female remains have been found in BC near where Una was last seen years ago. She reluctantly agrees to join him on the long road trip and give a DNA sample to identify the body. Will the answers bring closure for either one? The book's closure is brillaint. Recommended!

When Una disappeared many years ago, her parents flew to the seaside town of Tofino in the province of British Columbia to join the search. Now, once again, they make the trek across the country to learn if the newly uncovered bones belong to their daughter. Estranged and worn by life, their drive allows them time to reflect on the past in poignant yet profanity-laden memories.

The grief described in this book is undeniably heartbreaking. While neither of the main characters felt sympathetic—Kathleen is irascible, and Yannick is scattered—the reader cannot help but feel the pain the two endure. Sadly, this story felt all too real, as though it were a genuine autobiography.

Naturally, the subject matter discourages a recommendation of this book as an easy beach read. This book is one for quiet contemplation.


Thank you to Netgalley, Penguin Books and Sarah Leipciger for the opportunity to review this eARC. My opinions are my own, honest and true.

I loved this book. Which surprised me! I wasn’t sure going in if I truly would because it seemed like it was going to be a tad tedious and wordy, but it proved me wrong.

Very Canadian, it’s slightly in the same vein as The Observer by Marina Endicott (another Canadian author - a book I read last summer and somehow I still remember). However, Moon Road was an easier read with a bit more of an interesting premise. Not that I should really be comparing the two, but sometimes it’s hard not to.

It’s told from the point of views of an ex-couple, now both in their 70’s, whose daughter has gone missing for some 7000 odd days. She left in her early 20’s to get out of Ontario and answered the call to the west coast only to not be heard from by anyone after being there for a while. Her parents take a road trip out to British Columbia in the latest discovery that there’s a possibility bones found buried could be hers.

It flips back and forth from the past and present; their previous trips to find any kind of clue or insight out in BC for their daughter and the searches that were held to try and find her to no avail.

The ending reveals what truly happened to “our girl” as the narrator affectionately calls Una, the lost daughter. And it’s heartbreaking but relieving to find out. I was worried the author would leave it open ended.

Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger was hauntingly poignant and evoked some very strong feelings. Perhaps the Canadian landscape and familiar names made it hit closer to home, or knowing that if my math was correct "our girl" is of my generation, or it could be the author's writing is just so precise and moving... but this book enveloped me, ripped me apart, and spit me back out again, breaking my heart into a million different pieces while also being strangely poetically beautiful - or if not beautiful, bitingly complexly real.

This story captured me from the beginning and didn’t let go. Kathleen and Yannick were entirely believable characters, full of flaws and contradictory behaviour, as we humans tend to be. The ending was poignant and perfect.

This was my first novel by this author and it is a well written , intriguing read, the characters grew on you over time and you became invested in their heartache and resolution. The book portrays the story of a divorced couple Kathleen and Yannick in their 70s who travel across Canada together from Ontario to British Columbia for Kathleen to do an ( mRNA ) DNA test to find out if the 20 plus year old remains of a woman found are that of their missing daughter Una. The POV comes from all three characters and jumps ack and forth between the past and present day. This book does a good job of portraying the unending grief those left behind feel with no closure and how it shaped their lives.

This book is beautifully written and great for those who like literary fiction.


Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada | Viking for this ARC . This is my honest review.

The writing style was very poetic and beautiful but I found it difficult to follow the narrative. I wanted to feel a greater sense of setting with each place they stopped at but I felt removed from the whole thing. Definitely for fans of literary fiction, but not quite my cup of tea.

<b>On the Road to Find Out</b>
<i>Review of the NetGalley Kindle ARC (downloaded July 31, 2024) of the upcoming Penguin Random House Canada paperback (August 27, 2024).</i>

Kathleen and Yannick are the 70+ something parents of daughter Una who went missing in Tofino, British Columbia close to 22 years ago. They were already divorced by that time and in the intervening years Yannick has remarried twice and parented 4 other children. He hasn't even spoken to Kathleen for 19 years. Kathleen has withdrawn into a somewhat curmudgeonly life (apparently the female equivalent is supposed to be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termagant">termagant</a>, but does anyone really know that word?) of flower farming in a small town on the Otonabee River (near Peterborough) in Ontario, Canada.

Yannick suddenly appears at Kathleen's annual remembrance party for Una. Both of them have received a phone call from RCMP investigators in British Columbia. Unidentified bones have been found when a hiking trail was being cleared / built in parklands outside Tofino. Kathleen's DNA* is required for testing but she has hesitated to provide it, perhaps wanting to keep hope alive in Una's possible survival. Yannick convinces her to join him in a cross-country trip to British Columbia to provide the DNA (rather than do it via a local lab) but to seek some closure at the site where the bones were found.

That setup perhaps overstays its welcome, but when they hit the road and both bicker and snipe at each other, but gradually reconnect, the book really came alive for me. I've always enjoyed road books and this one had the humour and the pain of old partners becoming reacquainted and reaching a new found acceptance. The book examines the different ways we deal with family and grief as it contrasts Kathleen's and Yannick's lives.

As the journey progresses, we read flashbacks of their original trip to Tofino when Una was first reported missing. We also get intermittent peeks into Una's own life in her fateful final days. Not everyone's questions will be answered by the end, but the reader does obtain closure and Sarah Leipciger provides a somewhat transcendental conclusion.

My thanks to author Sarah Leipciger, Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this preview ARC, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.

<b>Soundtrack</b>
It also provided my lede, as I couldn't help but think of the Cat Stevens song <i>On the Road to Find Out</i> from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_for_the_Tillerman">Tea for the Tillerman</a> (1970) album. You can listen to that track on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocu7XObxRZ8">here</a> or on Spotify <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6que7uzO7kWGJDseSSi6Ag">here</a>.

In the book, Kathleen is listening to the car radio when an old favourite song of hers by the Violent Femmes comes on. The song is unnamed, but from the few sample lyrics quoted it is obviously <a href="https://genius.com/Violent-femmes-american-music-lyrics">American Music</a> from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Do_Birds_Sing%3F">Why Do Birds Sing?</a> (1991) album. You can listen to the song on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag0XRlEvap8">here</a> or on Spotify <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/21F39lpBdWHu5aRy68V8xj">here</a>.

<b>Footnote, Trivia and Link</b>
* The DNA genealogical testing which only a mother can do is Mitochondrial DNA or mDNA testing. These are passed unchanged from mother to child but not by the father. It is especially useful in the forensic & anthropological cases of testing bones in which the nuclear DNA is degraded. You can read more about Mitochondrial DNA at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA">Wikipedia</a>.

Kathleen and Yannick, a divorced couple, drive from Ontario to Vancouver Island when the bones of an unidentified woman are unearthed 20 or so years after their daughter mysteriously disappears.

I was attracted to this book because I was born in Winnipeg but have lived all but four years of my life on Vancouver Island. I’ve made a number of road trips across the prairies and through the mountains, and innumerable sailings across the sea between the mainland and the island, not to mention several trips over the years to Tofino where Kathleen and Yannick’s daughter Una is last seen. The road trip felt real to me. I could relate to all the descriptions and moods of the variable landscape, roadside stops, cheap restaurants and motels.

When I started reading Moon Road I initially disliked Kathleen, a prickly, self-centred woman in her mid-60s. But as the story unfolded I found I had greater empathy for her and the grief she’s living with. Yannick I liked from the get-go. As the couple journeys across Canada the story moves between the present and past, from both Kathleen’s and Yannick’s perspectives, and interspersed throughout those moments and memories are glimpses into the last day of Una’s life.

I thought the story was beautiful. It was rather dreamlike and poetic once the road trip got underway which I thought was fitting because that’s how long trips feel to me. We learn a great deal about both parents; their feelings, their memories, their regrets. The trip of course is hard on both of them, but it’s also very cathartic, especially for Kathleen.

The ending wasn’t quite what I was hoping for but at the same time it was also just right and very satisfying.

I highly recommend this book!

The story of two parents coming together to hopefully find answers to their daughter’s disappearance. Along the ride you see their relationship and how it changed once this traumatic event happened.

The characters bring you into the story and keep you invested in their story, sitting next to them on their journey. I quite enjoyed this book and seeing how their road trip turned out!

Tear jerker and emotionally wrecking !!
Kath and Yannick were so cute together and I couldn’t stop wishing for such a partner as Yannick myself!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an ARC of this novel.

Although there is a mystery at the heart of this novel, the truth of what has happened to their missing daughter is secondary to the truth about what has happened to her grieving parents, the central characters. Yannick and Kathleen. Nineteen years have passed since that day, during which time they have not communicated. When it appears that new evidence has been discovered, the long-estranged couple take to the road, travelling across Canada together on what turns out to be a voyage of discovery.

The road trip-to-self-discovery trope goes back to the Ancients, and there is a spate of novels out there about the tragedy of the child gone missing. Yannick is also drawn in familiar fashion as a hard-living oft-divorced aging man of French-Canadian descent. Kathleen is the prototypical angry woman. But in the author’s capable hands this story, with its precise attention to the mundane, shuffles three viewpoints—including that of the missing Una, retracing her final days—transcends the familiar. The questions that Yannick and Kathleen resist posing to themselves, as well as each other, aren’t the kind to be answered at the end of a trip along even a mythic Moon Road.

But Leipciger does an amazing job of showing how those questions will out, no matter the strength or length of the resistance. She lays out the bones of their buried grief for each to face alone. She shows the achingly believable ways in which that grief is both singular and universal, while always remaining not quite within reach of those who have not suffered it. And she leaves readers satisfied that such a quest is worth enduring even when we know what we seek cannot be found. This is a graceful, hopeful meditation on profound loss and living profoundly. Because, as Yannick puts it, in critical moments only two things are worth saying: ‘I am here’ and ‘I love you.’

Thank you to Net Galley and Penguin Random House for giving me this opportunity to read the ARC for 'Moon Road'.

While I found the novel slow paced, the character driven narrative affected me more than I expected it to. As a parent, I was heart broken at the still very real sense of profond loss. The drive from Ontario to British Columbia provided time for the character development but I did find the story and journey to be overlong.

Moon Road follows Kathleen and Yannick as they make their way across Canada to find out if their missing daughter's remains have been found. While I found the book on the slower side, my heart ached for both characters, and the way their lives fell apart after the disappearance of their daughter. It was well written with lovely descriptions, and characters with depth.

So sorry did not finish. I found the book boring and could not connect with MC's. I will nor recomment this book.

Thank you to net galley for giving me this opportunity to read the book 'Moon Road'.
The story centres around a broken family.
Kathleen met Yannick when he was working at her father's house she was 18 and he was 26. Kathleen soon becomes pregnant.
They have not spoken to each other for a number of years which had to do with their daughter Una.
A call has came from the west coast.
Kathleen and Yannick soon drive across Canada from Ontario to British Columbia. It seems some items were found and there has been missing women, so needless to say other families were also contacted.
I found this story to be heartfelt.
These are my own opinions.
On a personal note my son and his girlfriend and her sister did the same drive from Ontario to British Columbia the end of August 2021.
As I was reading the book the placenames were the towns my son and girlfriend and her sister had stopped at.

Moon Road is a novel focused on two characters, Kathleen and Yannick, both nearing their 70's. They share a grief for which only those who have lost a child can undisputedly relate. Their only child, Una, disappeared over twenty years ago. Una was an adult, mid-twenties, when she, for no reasonable explantation, decided to move from southern Ontario, Canada to the opposite end of the country on Vancouver Island, in the province of British Columbia. It is from there she vanished.

Kathleen and Yannick had been married when they had Una, however it did not last. Yannick went on to have two more wives, who did not last, and another four children. Kathleen remained single. Feisty would describe Kathleen while Yannick, although tall and solidly built, my impression would have him labelled "the man who fell in love too easily". He is tender-hearted.

As the book begins, Kathleen has not seen Yannick for many years following a rather violent falling out that included a heavy glass ashtray being thrown from Kathleen's arm and brutally finding it's target at the side of Yannick's eye. Thus stitches and a scar. Now, in his later years he approaches Kathleen's home and the subject of Una. Kathleen cannot find any peace with her loss of her daughter. She is determined to solve the mystery. Yannick also struggles. They have been notified by the RCMP in Tofino, BC that bones have been found that could be Una's and they need Kathleen's blood for a DNA match. There is something within only a mother's DNA helix that is needed for the test.

They decide they will drive in Yannick's truck across the country rather than just send the blood by medical courier. If the bones give up their identity as Una's, they want to be there in person. Yannick refuses to fly; aeroplanes are not for him. Thus the trip begins. This is the section of the book I enjoyed most. As a Canadian living in B.C with brief stays in Manitoba and Alberta, the drive for these two characters was vivid for me. As they drove through Winnipeg, Regina, Medicine Hat and approached the mighty Rocky mountains in western Alberta, I saw what they saw. I took the ferry to Vancouver Island and walked the beach at Tofino with them.

The relationship between Kathleen and Yannick, during this five-day trip, finds Kathleen beginning to soften within their long-term adversarial connection. Each is nervous about what the bones will reveal, whether they want a 'yes' or 'no'. answer. Yannick suffers constant pain in his back most of the time while Kathleen suffers self-inflicted pain from a tooth extraction the day prior to starting out, It has become a dry socket thanks to her ignoring the dentist's after care instructions. We are treated to their conversations, behaviour and thoughts along the way as we, too, begin to feel nervous about the outcome.

The timeline changes back and forth with each one being in the voice of Una, Kathleen or Yannick. These are the times during which we learn the most about each character. I loved Yannick, related to Kathleen and hurt my brain trying to guess what may have happened to Una, right to the end.

Sara Leipciger writes beautifully with some unique descriptions: "Her future looked like skid marks in a toilet"; "A fluorescent light mutters above their heads"; "The ferry horn clears it's throat". For me the ending was akin to a peaceful, remote whisper. Very fitting.

Thank you to the publisher for providing the ARC in return for this optional review. "Moon Road" will be available to the public August 27,2024

I just finished this book, I thought it started out pretty strong. I liked the character development for Una’s parents. However i thought the story got a bit lost mid book, it carried on longer than it needed to- it kind of lost me here. I finished the book and was glad I did to get the full story. Having driven across Ontario myself, I liked reading about their travels, many of the locations were familiar to me. Overall I would rate this a 3.5. Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy!