Traveling With Ghosts

Publication Date: March 2017

Goodreads Description

H IS FOR HAWK meets WILD. A beautiful memorial to a great love and a brave survival guide to coming to terms with loss. In the summer of 2002, Shannon Leone Fowler was backpacking with her fiancé Sean in Thailand. The couple were planning to return home after their excursion to the island of Koh Pha Ngan but their plans were devastated when a box jellyfish - the most venomous animal in the world - wrapped itself around Sean's legs, stinging and killing him in minutes. Rejecting the Thai authorities' attempt to label Sean's death as 'drunk drowning', Shannon accompanied his body home to his stunned family - a family to which she suddenly no longer belonged. Shattered, untethered and alone, Shannon set out on a journey to make sense of her loss. From contemplating the silence of Auschwitz to learning the rules for sitting shiva amid daily bombings in Israel, to finding humour and creativity in Sarajevo, a city still scarred by the recent war, Shannon charts a path through sorrow towards recovery.

Traveling with Ghosts is a beautiful memorial to love and an intensely personal account of learning to live with grief. It is the story of a brave journey towards survival.

My Review

Every now and then I need a break from the psychological thrillers and the crime procedurals that I love to read. At times like that, I often love to immerse myself in a true story or a memoir and so this book came along at just the right time for me.

Having read the blurb of this book, I really wanted to get my hands on a copy. Although the subject matter sounded sad - being a story of love and loss - there was a part of me that really wanted to read this book for the travel stories that, from the blurb, I knew it would contain. Being a passionate traveler myself, that aspect definitely appealed to me.

The second reason that made me want to read this book was that the author lost her fiance off an island in Thailand, a part of the world that I'm familiar with and that my own fiance and I have traveled to. We both absolutely loved Thailand, it's people and it's gorgeous islands and so when I read that the authors fiance had died there, from a box jellyfish sting, my heart just dropped. It's the type of thing that you never expect to happen but yet it can happen to anyone. I couldn't imagine being on such an amazing holiday in such an amazing country and something so terrible and devastating happening. It's one of those freak things that happen to people and, as selfish as it sounds, all you can do is say, "thank God that didn't happen to me". The hard hitting nature of the tragedy is also made to feel more real when the events take place somewhere that you, as the reader, have been and in a place that you know.

This book is part ode to a lost loved one and part travel memoir. The author did an exceptional job of introducing the reader to Sean, her 25 year old boyfriend who died in 2002 and to their loving and fun relationship. The pain that the author experienced and the utter devastation to her life are palpable. My heart went out to her in every way possible. It was also fascinating to read about how the author, who was studying to become a marine biologist at the time and who loved the ocean and all its creatures, lost her passion for the sea and was unable to step foot into it until a year after Sean's death.

This story jumps between the years prior to Sean's death, to the days around his death in 2002 and then to the 4 month period after his death when the author traveled around Eastern Europe on her own. I must be honest and say that although I enjoyed the chapters about her travels in Europe, I wasn't riveted by them and at times I found myself skimming some of the pages. I think this was more of a personal thing and I'm sure others will enjoy those chapters, especially if you have an interest in Bosnia, Israel, Poland and so on. I found myself loving the story of the relationship, of lost love and of the author's journey to acceptance, but some of the chapters on the Eastern European countries that she traveled to didn't always hold my full attention.

This is a well written book, a great salute to the man that the author once loved. It was sad, upsetting and tugged at the heart strings but it was also fascinating and I'm very glad that I read it.

My rating: * * * *

Many thanks to author Shannon Leone Fowler and to Jonathan Ball publishers for my copy.