Sunday Book Review: Making It Home

Making It Home: My year as a middle-aged runaway, by Liz Moore

I’m not even sure how to begin to say just how much I enjoyed this book. Let’s call it an adventure story for women approaching middle age. It’s a book about that thing we’ve often imagined ourselves doing. At least, I have always loved the idea of living elsewhere, getting to know new places and people by becoming a part of the community, and living (for a while, at least) without ties or roots or personal history.

Liz Moore was one of the presenters at the 2011 Kansas Authors Club Convention. I was so enthralled by her story that I purchased the book online for my Kindle PC free e-reader almost first thing when I got home. (For some reason I was under the impression that the book was only available for Kindle, but I now see that it is available in paperback, as well, which is all the better because this book would make a great gift.)

Liz gave herself a gift for her fiftieth birthday. She packed her car and began a cross country journey that would take her from Texas to Arizona to Oregon to Iowa to Vermont. She selected small towns along the way and lived in them, a few months at a time, working for temp agencies and doing things like cleaning and waitressing as she went.

Liz writes her story so wonderfully that you feel yourself along for the ride, wondering how she’s going to find affordable housing and where she will work next. You learn a little bit about each place she stays. The people she meets along the way are all so wonderfully human, and Liz’s ability to settle into a new place and a new routine constantly amazed me.

The year didn’t go exactly as she had planned, but even the way she incorporated the heartache and the sorrow into the story made it just that much better. As the title suggests, she eventually makes it home.

I’ve recommended this book to my book club. I think anyone who has ever experienced even a bit of wanderlust would appreciate Liz’s story.