2.7 stars

Aubry Tourvel was a bratty nine-year-old when she started to bleed to death at the dinner table. Soon, the treatments made her worse, and she escaped to the city’s outskirts. Then she realized that the only cure for her strange disease was to keep traveling. She cannot stay at any place for more than a few days. 

Thus began her neverending travel around the world from one end to another, meeting many people but never having someone to call her own. What happens to Aubry? Does her journey end? 

The story comes in Aubry’s third-person POV. 

The premise is quite intriguing, so when I saw the book was available, I grabbed an ARC. Though I’m a fan of rounded endings, I knew I wouldn’t get it in this one. 

The beginning is terrific. We start with the crisis and move on to some details in the past, and then the story goes back and forth. The timeline is as messy as it can get with no proper indication (except for the chapter titles, which are really helpful in making some sense of the flow). 

Once the initial curiosity wears off, we are left to follow the MC as she meanders through different lands, meets different people, makes friends, takes lovers, and moves on. 

Some of it is actually good since there are instances when Aubry goes into introspective mode or realizes that her way of manipulating others may not be the right move. Unfortunately, the MC remains distant and somehow, has the same tone almost throughout. 

However, the dialogues are stilted, even uncomfortable, and abrupt at times. It’s hard to get a hang of the MC, which means trying to empathize with her is also a tough task despite the circumstances. There are quite a few side characters- some of them are more distinct, while others blur into one another. Somehow, one character who could actually be important gets only a line at the end. 

This is also the kind of book that makes it easy to zone out. One second you could be reading, the next instant, you’d be planning your to-do list or humming lyrics from a song you heard a decade ago. The middle is the slowest and feels like we are going in circles. 

The puzzle ball and the secret doors, libraries, etc., are an attempt at magic realism. While I admire the inclusion of libraries, I wish the scenes were better executed. 

Though I ended up with a headache after reading this, I did enjoy the ending. It was better than I hoped. I might have liked it more if the book was 50-70 pages shorter. Aubry, unfortunately, is not interesting enough to sustain for 400+ pages. 

To summarize, A Short Walk Through a Wide World has a great premise and some worthy elements, but hasn’t wowed me. This is a niche book, so it may not give the same results to other readers (like me). 

Thank you, NetGalley and Avid Reader (Simon & Schuster), for eARC. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. 

#NetGalley #AShortWalkThroughAWideWorld 

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TW: Animal murders; quite a few scenes deal with killing animals (wild boar, strange bird, monkey, rabbit, etc.), and some are more graphic than others