But Maureen is not like Harold. She struggles to bond with strangers, and the landscape she crosses has changed radically. She has little sense of what she’ll find at the end of the road. All she knows is that she must get there. Fry fans will delight in this tale of a redemptive journey and the kindness of strangers. A new Joyce. Rejoice anew! Saga magazine

The book is written beautifully with the reading audience coming to know and welcome Maureen into our hearts. It is a worthy ending to the journey of the Fry'sAfter Harold Fry's journey, which takes place at the same time as Queenie's journey, I thought Harold's wife, Maureen, had reached her own better emotional place. She did in a way, she knew she was glad to have Harold with her even if his time is spent peacefully playing games or looking at nature with their neighbor, Rex. Maureen even went through some major steps to attempt closure concerning the suicide of their son, David, thirty years ago. But really, Maureen's brain and heart were brewing discontent, with no way that she could see to relieve it, other than sometimes erupting in anger at those around her. So sadly, I couldn't leave Harold and Maureen living happily ever after with their neighbor, Rex, because along comes the third book in the series, entitled Maureen. This fascinating compendium traces phobias and manias through their rich social, cultural and medical history. We learn that in the US, a third of all people with phobias suffer from a terror of cats (ailurophobia) or dogs (cynophobia). As well as well-known behaviours, Summerscale highlights less obvious fears such as hippophobia (fear of horses, made famous in Freud’s “Little Hans” case study) and coulrophobia (a morbid fear of clowns). The Fell Ten years ago, Harold Fry set off on his epic journey on foot to save a friend. But the story doesn’t end there. Now his wife, Maureen, has her own pilgrimage to make.

The second book, is the tale of what Queenie and her friends at Hospice, are doing, while Harold makes his pilgrimage. They follow his progress on TV, and implore Queenie to hang on! I saw Harold in a more positive light in this installment, and bawled like a blubbering baby! (5⭐️)Ten years ago, a fictional character called Harold Fry left his home in Devon to post a letter, then carried on walking. His destination was the hospice bedside of Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague who had written to say she was dying. Maureen, thinks of herself as not a nice person and at times, she’s not. She’s angry at times, sometimes down right nasty, but I mostly saw her as a grieving mother, trying to find a way to go on,a way to cope with her loss. When she discovers that Queenie made a sea side garden and in it a monument to Maureen and Harold’s son David, she knows she has to see it. It turned out to be a gift to a grieving mother, whose journey there allows her to make peace with others, but mostly with herself. I've found that readers' reactions to the first two books have been uneven. For example, I loved The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, but did not care for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

She’s off to see Queenie’s garden where there are tributes left for people… one of them in her garden is left there for Harold and Maureen’s son David who died by suicide. Maureen has never forgiven herself that she did not see how deeply troubled David was before he took his own life. She makes a journey by car to northern England to visit Queenie's garden which is now maintained by volunteers, and has no idea of how she will react emotionally. Maureen is a difficult woman who always found it challenging to relate to other people, but her journey is one of forgiveness and hope for the future.

Maureen Fry is an emotionally damaged woman who is grieving for David, her son who died many years earlier. The third book of the Harold Fry trilogy revolves around Maureen, Harold's wife. The trilogy started when Harold went on a pilgrimage to visit his friend, Queenie, in a hospice. Years earlier, Queenie had made a memorial garden by the sea using found objects washed up by the ocean in combination with greenery and flowers. One part of the garden was dedicated to David Fry because Queenie regretted that she was unable to help the young man who committed suicide. Maureen is no tiptoe through the tulips, waving at butterflies type of woman. There has been too much hurt and embarrassment from her childhood belief that she was the center of the world and that she would be the one to conquer it every step of the way. As early as her first days in school she learned she wasn't all that after all and it was downhill from there. Once Harold and Maureen had their only son, she wanted to be the best parent to him but things did not work out at all. I think the term "difficult child" applied to both Maureen and David and that difficulty can lead to the term "difficult adult". This is book 3 in the Harold Fry trilogy and while it helps to have read them all, it’s not essential. It’s been years since I read Harold so I could barely remember him and it didn’t matter. Maureen is very much a character in her own right and this story is hers and hers alone.

This is a deceptively simple story of love, forgiveness, fulfilment and hope. I can't think of any other novelist quite as tender and compassionate as Rachel Joyce, who understands that miracle of transformation when human fragility becomes strength of spirit. Bel Mooney I read A LOT of books, so a few weeks after I finish one, I am often forgetting the details of story.The fact was she’d had the satnav disconnected. She couldn’t bear that nice voice urging directions at her and telling her last minute that she’d missed the turn. Maureen was of the generation who had grown up with the phone on the hall table, and a map in the glove compartment. Even online shopping was a stretch. Twenty lemons instead of two, and all that kind of thing. A complex woman trying to make a reasoning out of the death of her son thirty years ago and just discovering herself is the theme of this tale. The final novel in the Harold Fry trilogy, this is a heart-stopping story told from the view point of his wife Maureen as she takes her own journey and discovers how to reconnect with the world.