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A review by liralen
Beneath Wandering Stars by Ashlee Cowles
4.0
I miss the Camino—I miss the friends I made walking it, I miss having nothing to do but walk, I miss the satisfaction of throbbingly sore feet at the end of the day. But it'll be a while before I can do anything like it again, so in the meantime...books.
Beneath Wandering Stars is one of the few fictional accounts I've found of the Camino. Here, Gabi takes to the road in the name of her older brother, Lucas, who has been severely wounded in Afghanistan. (The cover copy says that she's honouring a vow, but that's not true—prior to her brother's injury, Gabi had heard of the Camino, but that's it. She learns from Lucas's best friend, Seth, that Lucas wanted them to do the Camino if he were to be injured or killed.) She's accompanied by Seth, who is also a soldier and served with Lucas in Afghanistan.
As a book, separate from my personal knowledge of the Camino, I appreciate that Cowles brings a lot more in here that the Camino itself—there are layers of story. The Camino does not much matter to Gabi except that it gives her some tenuous connection to her brother and lets her hope that, just maybe, she's doing something that will help him.
The way the Camino is depicted here...I'm not sure. Gabi and Seth have a lot more excitement along the way than I'd expect, although nothing impossible and I suppose fiction does tend to up the ante when it can. It's not clear exactly when this is set, but presumably within the last few years, and some of the details are off. For example: to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a direct train from Paris to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port (a very very common starting point for the Camino, and where Gabi and Seth get started) (53). A French man will not address a girl as 'mon chéri' (58); the appropriate French would be 'ma chérie' (or, more likely, 'ma chère'). The albergue at Roncesvalles is no longer 'a dank and drafty monastery' (62)—I cannot find exact details on the whens and hows, but the present-day albergue has been functioning since 2011 and is clean and modern. I never saw an Internet café that charged 2€ for ten minutes (77)—more like 2€ for an hour. (My personal info is from 2015—I didn't have a smartphone and was reliant on coin-operated computers for email and the like—but posts on Camino forums from earlier years say pretty much the same thing.) Gabi's knowledge of the Camino (and the cathedral in Santiago) is really scattered—she knows what, and where, the Tree of Jesse is, and calls the Pórtico da Gloria by name (230), but has never heard of the botafumeiro (231)...which, I guess so. Maybe. (Not really.)
That's all splitting hairs, I know, and it doesn't really matter except that it's little mismatched details that tend to take me out of a story. A bigger question: Gabi and Seth, due to time constraints, bus through the meseta (a dry, flat stretch of walking—about a week's worth—between Burgos and León). It's not uncommon—a lot of pilgrims choose to skip the meseta, and it's not a 'wrong' thing (to do or to write about), but to me it's a slightly puzzling choice for a fictional narrative, simply because it's such a rich landscape for tension. I rather wonder whether that was a portion of the Camino that Cowles did not walk, and thus a portion that she did not write about?
But. All that being said: This steps outside the bounds of both standard YA and standard Camino memoir, and it's the better for it. Worth the read.
Beneath Wandering Stars is one of the few fictional accounts I've found of the Camino. Here, Gabi takes to the road in the name of her older brother, Lucas, who has been severely wounded in Afghanistan. (The cover copy says that she's honouring a vow, but that's not true—prior to her brother's injury, Gabi had heard of the Camino, but that's it. She learns from Lucas's best friend, Seth, that Lucas wanted them to do the Camino if he were to be injured or killed.) She's accompanied by Seth, who is also a soldier and served with Lucas in Afghanistan.
As a book, separate from my personal knowledge of the Camino, I appreciate that Cowles brings a lot more in here that the Camino itself—there are layers of story. The Camino does not much matter to Gabi except that it gives her some tenuous connection to her brother and lets her hope that, just maybe, she's doing something that will help him.
The way the Camino is depicted here...I'm not sure. Gabi and Seth have a lot more excitement along the way than I'd expect, although nothing impossible and I suppose fiction does tend to up the ante when it can. It's not clear exactly when this is set, but presumably within the last few years, and some of the details are off. For example: to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a direct train from Paris to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port (a very very common starting point for the Camino, and where Gabi and Seth get started) (53). A French man will not address a girl as 'mon chéri' (58); the appropriate French would be 'ma chérie' (or, more likely, 'ma chère'). The albergue at Roncesvalles is no longer 'a dank and drafty monastery' (62)—I cannot find exact details on the whens and hows, but the present-day albergue has been functioning since 2011 and is clean and modern. I never saw an Internet café that charged 2€ for ten minutes (77)—more like 2€ for an hour. (My personal info is from 2015—I didn't have a smartphone and was reliant on coin-operated computers for email and the like—but posts on Camino forums from earlier years say pretty much the same thing.) Gabi's knowledge of the Camino (and the cathedral in Santiago) is really scattered—she knows what, and where, the Tree of Jesse is, and calls the Pórtico da Gloria by name (230), but has never heard of the botafumeiro (231)...which, I guess so. Maybe. (Not really.)
That's all splitting hairs, I know, and it doesn't really matter except that it's little mismatched details that tend to take me out of a story. A bigger question: Gabi and Seth, due to time constraints, bus through the meseta (a dry, flat stretch of walking—about a week's worth—between Burgos and León). It's not uncommon—a lot of pilgrims choose to skip the meseta, and it's not a 'wrong' thing (to do or to write about), but to me it's a slightly puzzling choice for a fictional narrative, simply because it's such a rich landscape for tension. I rather wonder whether that was a portion of the Camino that Cowles did not walk, and thus a portion that she did not write about?
But. All that being said: This steps outside the bounds of both standard YA and standard Camino memoir, and it's the better for it. Worth the read.