Traveling Light

December 15, 2016
Branard brings readers the later-in-life coming-of-age story of 35-year-old Alissa Wells, who leads a pretty uneventful existence working for her dad's small-town newspaper in North Carolina. On a whim, she enters an online bidding contest for a random storage unit she saw on a reality-TV show and, nine weeks later, she is standing in the storage unit with the most interesting item in her hands: a dead man's remains from a mortuary in New Mexico. Alissa is more than a little intrigued as to how Roger Hart's remains ended up in a storage unit so far from home and impulsively decides to jump in the car with her three-legged dog and drive to New Mexico in hopes of returning Roger to his family. Along the way, she picks up Blossom, a teenager wise beyond her years; a dose of self-confidence; and a new way of looking at life. Branard's deliberate pacing mirrors the journey to self-realization Alissa undergoes. Readers will be pulling for Alissa all the way to the novel's satisfying conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)