Moon Road, by Sarah Leipciger (Doubleday, 2024).
Reviewed by Jane Christmas
Late last November, a young man who had been missing in the B.C. interior for 50 days staggered toward two shocked oil workers. They bundled him up and sped him off to hospital. The young man’s family never gave up hope that their son would survive the Canadian wilderness. It’s the sort of miracle you want for the family of Una, a free-spirited 20-year-old whose disappearance dominates Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road.
Grief has formed a rough callous on Una’s mom Kathleen. Abrasive, uncompromising, she organises each year an Awareness Party on the anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance more than 20 years ago hoping that the candle jars of pebbles, tea lights and a laminated photo of Una will keep the girl’s memory alive and the unbearable at bay. But it’s exacted a toll on the wider community, the circle of neighbours and volunteers who have supported Kathleen but now barely tolerate her ragged parties and her indomitable belief that her daughter is alive.
The reader isn’t sure what to believe. Leipciger inserts short, tantalising chapters that flip back to Una’s carefree life on the West Coast. Clues and events are laid out, creating a hope in the reader that maybe Una is indeed alive, or if she’s not, then perhaps it’s possible to piece together cause or reason why. These are blind alleys: We are no more in possession of necessary information than Una’s parents, the police, or the volunteers who search for Una. It is human nature to want to solve things, and we are so accustomed to wanting to lay the blame on the evil actions of another, or on lifestyle choice or addiction, or even on a decision by the missing to not be found, that we fail to accept that the reason might be much more banal.
While Kathleen keeps busy on the home front running her flower business and maintaining her solitary vigil, Una’s father Yannick has moved on, to other relationships, to siring other children. He retreats into himself and his new family whereas Kathleen stays fixed in place, doggedly maintaining a tally on her fridge door of the number of days Una has been missing; 7,968 days when Moon Road begins. Long divorced, they have not seen one another for twenty years, but when B.C. police contact Yannick with new information concerning Una’s disappearance, he decides to drive West, persuading Kathleen to accompany him. Ex-wife and ex-husband, now in their late sixties and early 70s respectively, embark on a cross-country road trip.
Leipciger handles with perception and compassion a story of parental perseverance, loss and reconciliation, of the knotty, complicated bond that exists between estranged couples who handle their shared grief in different ways.
Once out West, at the scene of Una’s last sighting at the edge of a dock, new DNA techniques and theories raise another plume of hope. It is Yannick, however, who proves the more philosophical of the two in this poignant passage:
Life has shown Yannick that you can just as easily grieve the kid you haven’t lost as the one you have. Even now, especially now, when he looks at the pictures of his kids when they were still fat and plush around the edges, and bubbling with all that chaotic jumping around, silky messy hair bouncing, happy spittle on those red lips, or if he watches a video [of his children] well it can feel an awful lot like mourning, like grief. Because when they grow up, your kids, they are different. Growing up is, in its way, a little bit like death. Your kid is two people: the one that belongs to you, needs you, and the one that does not.
–Sarah Leipciger, Moon Road, p. 284.
Born in Canada, Sarah Leipciger lives in London, England. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and also teaches at City Lit. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Fish Prize, and the Bridport Prize. She is the author of The Mountain Can Wait (2015) and Coming Up for Air (2020). Moon Road is her third novel.
Jane Christmas is the author of five journey memoirs, two of which (And Then There Were Nuns (2013), and Open House: A Life in 32 Moves (2020)) were shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour. Her first novel, A Quarrel of Saints, will be released in Spring 2025. Born in Toronto, she has lived in England since 2012.
Further
- Excerpt of Coming up for Air in London Magazine
- Quill and Quire review of The Mountain Can Wait, and of Coming Up for Air
- Coming Up For Air reviewed by Louise Ells
- Sarah Leipciger Recommends Three Books at Claire Fuller
- Sarah Leipciger at Penguin Randomhouse Canada
- Jane Christmas at Harper Collins
- Other books reviewed by Jane Christmas for Canadian Writers Abroad: Islands in the Clouds, French Exit, Homesickness, Woman, Watching and The Damages
