Newly married and established in her career as an award–winning newspaper journalist, Maggie Downs quits her job, sells her belongings, and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother’s.As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. “You are braver than you think,” her mother always insisted. … always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries―visiting all the places her mother, struck with early–onset Alzheimer’s disease, could not visit herself―encountering some of the world’s most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother. Interweaving travelogue with family memories, Braver Than You Think takes the reader hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, white–water rafting on the Nile, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary in Bolivia, praying at an ashram in India, and fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt.
By embarking on an international journey, Downs learned to make every moment count―traveling around the globe and home again, losing a parent while discovering the world. Perfect for fans of adventure memoirs like Wild and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, Braver Than You Think explores grief and loss with tenderness, clarity, and humor, and offers a truly incredible roadmap to coping with the unimaginable.
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What an adventure.
The heroine of this novel had a very close relationship with her mother. Her mother had always wanted to travel but never was able to. Her mother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease to the extent that in the end she does not even recognize her daughter . The daughter decides to do the travels her mother had always wanted to do. At first she goes to Machu Pichu with her husband for their honeymoon, but then she continues to travel to various continents. While in Egypt her mother dies. She goes home, but then continues her travels at times making friends at times finding herself in predicaments.
Enjoyed reading and learning about so many different places, cultures and author experiences.
With a mother in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, Maggie Downs tries to run from her grief, but instead takes us to the far reaches of the globe, cuddling (and being bitten) by endangered monkeys, bonding with elephants, and working to save sea turtles. It’s a journey to make any of us wonder if we’re braver than we think.
Gorgeous prose, fascinating adventures, and a lot of heart.
Maggie Downs. I always enjoy books by journalists. Their experience in telling a story is significantly linked to my pleasure in reading. Ms. Downs enchants me with stories of her travels to exotic places, intersperced with her ruminations about dealing with a mother with Alzeimers. She faces mortality, as we face out shared fate, and gives us lessons in dealing with the complexity of life between children and parents. This is a doubly worthwhile read.
Having experienced my own loss, this book helped remind me grief travels its own path and we our own unique journey. The story is inspirational in giving me hope that in time we all can find our inner peace.
Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime by Maggie Downs is a travel memoir. Maggie is anticipating a grieving process as her mother nears the end of her life due to Alzheimer’s disease. She decides to take a year of her life and travel in honor of her mother to all the places her mom had wanted to visit. Maggie is not really emotionally prepared for the hardships of travel at the beginning of the trip. There are times of joyful insight and other times of deep despair during Maggie’s travels. “In the midst of chasing life, I’ll have discovered I am mortal, decidedly so, and that has to be enough. I will be fragile, I will be sorrowful, I will be wounded, and I will be capable of finding pinpricks of light among the darkness.” Many times Maggie wrestled with the knowledge that her mother had to linger for ten years with this debilitating disease. I enjoyed reading about the places she visited. I was surprised that many of the areas Maggie stayed were places which had been war-torn and harbored sadness among the people, such as Rwanda. Some destinations were not a pleasure trip for sure!
I loved her descriptions of the approach at Macchu Picchu. Her experience listening to the prayers and hymns on the top of Mount Sinai was beautifully written.
Publication Date: May 12, 2020
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.