I went to a writing workshop taught by author Christian Kiefer once and he said something along the lines of, “Every story is basically The Odyssey told over and over again in different ways”. 

A Short Walk Through a Wide World (to be known as ASWTAWW from here on out) is, essentially, an Odyssean story, save Odysseus starts the journey in 1885 as a nine year-old girl named Aubry finds an enigmatic wooden puzzle ball on the ground in front of the house of a neighbor who has died in her home city of Paris. Very shortly after Aubry finds this ball, she becomes struck with some sort of weird affliction that keeps her on the move: She can’t stay in a city for more than a couple of days without starting to die, and she can never go back from whence she came. 

This is a wonderfully written book: It’s engaging, interesting, emotional, insightful, and incredibly intriguing. The book is informally broken up into three acts: The beginnings of Aubry’s journey and some of her lessons in love, her adventures in friendship and the beginnings of discovering what the book calls the “Terra Obscura”, and then the book gets more retrospective and sentimental as Aubry grows older and more forgetful after wandering the Earth for almost her entire life before starting to tie some things together for the ending. 

It’s a thoughtfully crafted story, written by an author who obviously treasures knowledge in all forms and put a lot of care into his story.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.