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If you didn’t enjoy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry or The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, then I wouldn’t recommend this one . But if you loved those books and those characters as I did, don’t miss this one, a story focused on Harold’s wife bringing the reader full circle around the lives of these characters. In the lovely preface to the novel, Joyce describes her thought process around the three characters with a metaphor of “the sticky closet door��. Harold and Queenie are given their due and moved through “the sticky closet door�� by Joyce and into my heart in the first two books. Maureen in those books was for me a bit of an enigma, but when Joyce decided that she’s entitled to her due, I was compelled to follow her on her own journey ten years after Harold’s .

Maureen, thinks of herself as not a nice person and at times, she’s not. She’s angry at times, sometimes down right nasty, but I mostly saw her as a grieving mother, trying to find a way to go on,a way to cope with her loss. When she discovers that Queenie made a sea side garden and in it a monument to Maureen and Harold’s son David, she knows she has to see it. It turned out to be a gift to a grieving mother, whose journey there allows her to make peace with others, but mostly with herself.

Maureen’s journey unlike Harold’s is not a walk, but a car ride. It’s not as open and inclusive as Harold’s, but a more private, solo venture. Yet, there are a few people that she meets along the way that are kind and generous as Harold encountered ten years earlier. It’s a bit quirky, sad, funny and very moving. Even though its less than two hundred pages, Rachel Joyce manages to get Maureen through that “sticky closet door �� and into my heart. Her imagined interview with Maureen at the end is priceless.

I received a copy of this book from Dial Press/Random House through NetGalley.