Away by Amy Bloom

I almost returned this book to the library without reading it but something made me renew it and give it one more try. I'm glad I did. With one exception that I will get to later, this was a great book that I enjoyed reading and looked forward to each night.

The story is about a woman named Lillian who leaves Eastern Europe in 1924 after her family is brutally murdered. She lands in America, lives with distant relatives, and tries to start her life over. However, she finds out that her daughter may still be alive, so she begins a dangerous trip across the United States and up through Canada in hopes of eventually reaching Siberia. Along the way, she meets many interesting characters and, like most heroines in journey novels, finds out a lot about herself.

My only criticism of the book is that there is an unusually high number of sexual situations. Individually, each of the encounters served a purpose in the narrative, but put together they seemed egregious rather than appropriately descriptive.

That aside, I did enjoy reading this story and spending time with the characters.