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!

Leipciger gives a great travel log of Canada from Ontario to BC while blending in a twenty year saga of what happened to a troubled loved 22 yr old daughter that suddenly disappeared. Makes you think what you would do and for how long if your child disappeared.

This is a book about grieving parents searching for their missing daughter. I love this book, the writing was smart, and I loved how the mundane every day things can mean so much between some people but mean very little to others outside of it, or due to time.

5/5, thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House. I want to read all of her books now.

My heart broke for Kathleen and Yannick as we follow them on a journey to discover if remains that were found belong to their missing daughter. Sarah Leipciger realistically portrays how people react differently to situations they face. Moon Road was a powerful read and I felt many different emtions throughout they story. Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for my ARC.

LOVE

I was pulled in right from the beginning. I knew I would like this one. And I didn't just like it, I loved it.

see my review on goodreads!

This was a unique read. In parts I found it a bit clunky, but overall I like the familiarity of it as they take from Ontario across the provinces. The mundaneness of life and the uprooting of an event is well represented and makes for an emotionally infused read.

Deliberate and haunting, Moon Road deftly explores loss and human connection. It's unassumingly tense and unapologetically beautiful.

Decades after their daughter goes missing, a long divorced couple road trips across the country when new evidence may finally give them answers.

The writing is beautiful and melodic, the chapters balance alternating perspectives of current events and their recollection of the past. These sections have interludes from the POV of the missing daughter and let me tell you, it's been a long while since I was this rapt with anticipation.

It's not a thriller or even a mystery but I was so tense as each page brought us a little closer to finding out what happened. It reminded me of a hybrid of two Emily St. John Mandel novels, Last Night in Montreal and The Glass Hotel but it absolutely stands on it's own and was a brilliant read.

I'm so thankful to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada the advanced copy of this novel.

A book about grieving parents searching for a lost daughter. The mother’s grief is profound and causes her to alienate herself from meaningful relationships with almost everyone in her life . The father the same . The book recounts this grief plus a road trip to Vancouver to search for answers.The ending is satisfying for the reader but not for the parents. A book of loss and never knowing why .

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

3.5* rounded up. Kathleen and Yannick's daughter Una disappeared in Tofino about 20 years ago and they are contacted after human remains are found in a provincial park. They drive from Ontario to Vancouver Island so that Kathleen can give a DNA sample for comparison purposes (even though she could have done this in Ontario) and to see the site where the body was found. Kathleen is fairly unlikeable and Yannick (from whom she has been divorced for several decades and estranged from for most of the time Una has been missing) is gentle except when he drinks. There are continual flashbacks describing Yannick's subsequent marriages and how each has dealt with the loss of Una. There are also chapters from the perspective of 'our girl' which it gradually becomes clear are explaining exactly what happened to Una.

Once I had got over the fact that Kathleen was so hard to like, I quite enjoyed this novel, and especially the road trip element. Once they hit BC and started stopping at places I have actually lived and/or holidayed I was very excited, but in fact at that point I started to like the book less. Who would imagine Prince George would feature as a place Kathleen visited? I know Prince George well, but got no sense of it from the description here. Tofino was represented better, but there was a sense of places being listed for the sake of it at times.

The ending was a little disappointing to me, not that I wanted everything tied up in a neat bow, but I wasn't sure what was next for Yannick and Kathleen. Beautifully written.