Review: Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly – Joanna Glen

The path to true love doesn’t run smooth, as they say, and certainly not if your families are both really weird. But I love a good tale of people being really very strange, and as this one also involves puffins and an octopus, AND has a map, what’s not to like?

Actually the review copy I had didn’t have the map in and I would really have appreciated it so will be nipping out to grab a copy and examine it properly. We should have more maps in books.

I really enjoyed both of Joanna Glen’s previous books (The Other Half of Augusta Hope and All My Mothers) and this is another deep dive into the quirks and foibles of others. Glen seems to specialise in people who have very odd relationships with their parents, just the sort of book I like, and in this case, both sets of parents are very odd indeed.

It’s a dual narrative, and starts with Addie, who lives with her mother on a remote island where they offer a women-only retreat service, or rather Addie does most of the skivvying while her mother does the life coaching. Sol is mourning his mother and has come to find her in the ‘thin places’ – where the links between this life and the next are easier to find. He is staying on the next island, another retreat, this time with a monk, and of course you know that the two will find each other somehow.

But it’s not the meeting, it’s the staying – or the escaping. Both Addie and Sol are in need of rescue, her physically, him emotionally and both are bereaved and affected by family feuds. I won’t go into it too much, but a book that combines talk of faith and hope with mermaids and someone having their jaw wired shut – I mean, there’s a lot here.

The settings are lush and so well described. It’s not just the islands but the other places they go – they were so well described it all went very visual in my head, which is not how I normally read. Glen spends a lot of time on the main characters, developing them and if the secondary characters are so much in the background, they’re more like tertiary characters, well, that’s ok here.

It’s a slow read, a long build up and amble rather than a pacey love story, so immerse yourself and go along for the ride.

Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly is published on 20 June by Borough Press.