Book Reviews
Growing Up Girl: Book One, Untethered is a journey through time and space in the life of Bernadette Aller, now in her mid-70s. Caroline Fairless, a first-time novelist, takes readers on a mysterious adventure, asking us to trust her with our heads and hearts as she loosens our sense of reality with time travelers and visitations from the so-called “dead.” Time morphs backward and forward as it does in real life within our life of memory. Frustrated and longing to tell her story, Bernadette hires Scully Trippe, to finally write her story as it tumbles out in the only way it can unfold. We travel back and forth in time through the challenges, triumphs, and tragedies in Bernadette’s life. The characters are fascinating: I fell in love with many of them – especially Dominic, Lucinda, and, of course, Bernadette herself, who is by no means easy to understand or get along with. I laughed and cried, and can’t wait for Book Two!
– Cat Greenstreet, Millbrook, NY
Growing Up Girl: Book One, Untethered takes you on a journey that begins to feel like your own. With each word, you easily place yourself into Bernadette's life. You experience the depth of her emotions and can't imagine it ending. Each chapter is tied together so beautifully and includes historical references that don't just inform the narrative; they emotionally ground the characters' experiences. This book is masterfully written and is easily five out of five stars.
-Jonetta
As a reader, if you are looking for a well written book with humor, heart, vulnerability, enormous courage, mystery, insight and beautiful prose, I whole heartedly recommend reading Untethered by Caroline Fairless. And perhaps the best part, if there can be such a thing, is that this is the first volume of a three part series.
Megan LeBoutillier
Growing Up Girl: Book One, Untethered, is one of the smartest books I have ever read. And I loved that so much that I didn’t want it to end – AND I couldn’t stop reading. So after reading it the first time, I read it again!
Somehow author Caroline Fairless teaches me quantum physics and leaves me wanting more. I feel breathless, like I did after falling down the Rabbit Hole in Alice in Wonderland. I feel hopeful, like I did after reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Yes, that’s it: Caroline Fairless has written the adult version of L’Engle’s classic middle school novels. And I am SO grateful as I need the hope I get from Bernadette and her friends!
This is Book One of a trilogy – and that thrills me – and scares me that the next one can’t possibly be this good!
Dr. Sally Z. Hare
Untethered is a heartbreakingly beautiful book that you won’t want to put down. Even after you’ve finished it. Fortunately, it is only Book One of the trilogy-in-process – Growing Up Girl. So there is more to come.
Compellingly written, Untethered explores the challenging, painful, perplexing and exhilarating journey toward liberation for one who grew up girl – Bernadette Aller. But the liberation not just for Bernadette, the main character (though the notion of a “main character” in a novel that mystically engages quantum reality is at least a little blurry), but for each and everyone of its entire quirky, everyday cast of characters – women and men.
From building her own house in rural Vermont and then seeing it burn down, to following a lost-cause love interest across the country, to joining a community of squatters in a condemned building in Seattle where she finds work driving a city bus, in a narrative that weaves through time and space and includes a ghost writer, a ghost and a time traveler, Bernadette experiences her way deeper and deeper into her core, onward toward liberation.
I predict you’ll love this story. You’ll come to love Bernadette and the whole cast of characters. And you’ll be eager for Book Two to find its way into your hands.
Charles Gibbs
Growing Up Girl: Book One is a masterpiece. We get to know the complex outer and even more layered and intriguing inner life of the main character, Bernadette Aller. Bernadette employs a ghostwriter, which is a brilliant literary choice, to tell her story as she attempts to capture, and perhaps even understand, the good, the tragic, and the mystical that weaves through her life. This memoir-like story is not linear in space or time which challenges the reader to open our own lens of understanding and awareness. Even though the story and characters can get complex and traumatic at times, the author meticulously and with great care paints the details and develops the characters so we are right there in the middle of it all.
Haqiqa
Burnadette. Ah, yes, I knew Bernadette growing up. What a hoot she was. The book, Untethered, tells all about her—home builder, risk taker, bus driver, friend and helper. Just like Bernadette, don’t expect a straight line kind of telling. Quite the contrary, Untethered jumps, no more like hops, through Bernadette’s own wanderings in a most compelling and enjoyable way. Yes, find a copy of Untethered, Growing Up Girl. You’ll enjoy the adventures and want to know what comes next.
Erl G Purnell
I loved following and flowing with Bernadette across the decades, across the country and across time-space boundaries. What a marvelous, entangled creation she is – full of the mad fury of aging and the passionate adventures of the young and everything in-between.
Caroline has a powerful language capacity - a way of drawing you into our private shadowy imaginal worlds - so often left unexplored. She creatively spins out tales from those we would not often meet in our social bubbles. Who would imagine a bus-rider community? Or a beloved squatter community? Or a private room full of birds?
More than anything, for me to read ‘Untethered’ was to grow my own story with fresh questions about community beyond borders, about places traveled and magical earth-bound seasons and the painful joys of also being a forever ‘growing-up girl’. And – btw - this is for boys too! I can’t wait to read the next volume!
Carol Kortsch