Food and travel writer Rosie Schaap last talked to her husband on Valentine’s Day 2010. The next day, he died following a fight with cancer. In The Slow Road North, Schaap recounts her grief and the (slow) road to healing. As she enters a too-young widowhood, she leaves New York for North Ireland, a place she lived in college. There, the pace and culture of village life prove a futile ground for Schapp’s journalistic impulse to learn others’ stories — stories invariably plotted with losses and griefs and the joys that give them context. Really, Schaap’s book reads like an exercise in the kind of story-sharing she experiences in North Ireland. The result is a personal story braided in and out of the stories of a place and the people who inhabit it. Some reviews spend too much space on Schaap’s treatment of North Irish social history, and she does recount regional history throughout. But The Slow Road North isn’t about North Ireland nearly as much as the relationship among grief and memory and love and a community’s ability to share it. As Schaap writes, “To love is to remember; to remember is to keep loving.”
Out August 20, 2024.