The Gap Year by Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is a local author for me.  She lives here in Austin and spoke with my book group a couple of years ago when we discussed The Yakota Officer's Club.  When I saw that she had a new book, The Gap Year, and that it was about a mother and a daughter and that amazingly emotional time of preparing an only child for college, I raced to request a spot on this blog tour.  I'm very glad that I did.  Let me just say that I loved The Gap Year!  I was only a few pages into it when I had to go research whether Sarah herself was the mother of an only child (she is, a son) and if her child was recently college age (he was, born in 1989).  I knew it!  I settled in to let The Gap Year uncover a few memories and feelings that I experienced sending my precious only girl off into the world 10 years ago.

Cam Lightsey is the single mother of Aubrey, a cherished only child, who is on the cusp of what her mother thinks of as "the beginning of her adventures" or what we know as the summer after senior year - that summer that a mother dreads and anticipates and works hard for.  Aubrey knows she is the daughter of a mother who has always been slightly out of step with the suburban community that they live in.  Cam is a lactation consultant and free spirit who met Aubrey's father in Morocco on a train.  Martin was "finding himself" and dipping into books about religions and philosophies, searching for the perfect path.  Unfortunately, that path led him to leave Cam and Aubrey before his daughter's 2nd birthday when he joined a cult called Next!.  Cam and Martin moved to the suburbs originally to insure that their daughter was placed in an excellent school district.  And she was, sort of.

Well, time passes and Cam is sure that she knows everything about Aubrey, her goals, her secret thoughts, her place in the hierarchy of teen life at her local high school.  Cam is determined to get Aubrey successfully off to college, preferably one that she has picked out.  Cam has a plan.  My questions is: what teenager ever tells their parents everything about their lives - even teens that "seem" like they are bonded so tightly to their parents and their parents' aims and goals for them? 

Aubrey's life is not at all like her mother thinks.  She's been part of the marching band, but during the summer before her senior year, things change.  She meets and actually throws up on the star quarterback, Tyler Moldenhauer, as he rescues her from a heat exhaustion incident.  Meeting and getting to know Tyler is the catalyst that changes Aubrey and causes her to reexamine all the things that she thought she "had" to do - like going to college.  And, she's also secretly been talking with her father on Facebook.  Cam is about to get the shock of her life when she discovers that her little girl has new goals, new plans, new pursuits, and she never had a clue.  How will mother and daughter weather the storm of "growing up"?  Hmmm....it's quite a journey.

The Gap Year is told from the viewpoints of both mother and daughter.  Cam's chapters are set in the latter part of that summer after graduation.  Aubrey's part of the story begins exactly one year before Cam's, setting the stage for all the changes to come.  As Cam discovers more and more about Aubrey and how much she's changed, the reader gets to hear from Aubrey herself how her thought processes altered and why she's not going to go meekly onto the path her mother has mapped out.  I think this narrative device worked very well.  Both Cam and Aubrey were annoying at times, but they are a lot more alike than they realize.  It was easy for me to see things from both points of view, especially when they related the same incidents from diverse ends of the spectrum.

Sarah Bird does not specifically set this book in Central Texas, but it was clear that she was influenced by many aspects of life in our part of the country.  Austin is an interesting place to live, and it will tell you a lot to know that the slogan for our town is "Keep Austin Weird!".  It's very much a mishmash of new and old, liberal and conservative, urban and suburban, hippie and cowboy.  And, as this is Texas, football is purported to be king.  All of this and more is given a nod in The Gap Year.

I laughed a lot and even shed a tear or two.  It's a book that I can recommend, especially to any mother who ever questioned whether she really knew her "oh so very close to grown" kiddo.  I'll leave you with the link to an interview that the author did with Texas Monthly Magazine.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Thanks to Lisa of TLC Book Tours for letting me be part of this tour.  It was most appreciated!  For other stops on the tour, go here.