Difficult to get through as the writing was long winded, too many distractions from the story

Seventeen-year-old Katey embarks on a road trip, ostensibly to find her biological father, but just as importantly to see what life is like outside small-town Vermont. It is the middle of the 1960s and conscription to the US military adventure in Vietnam is beginning to be felt in Katey’s generation. She has grown up with a father traumatised by his experience in Germany at the end of WWII, though she knows little detail of what happened to him - that comes from her mother’s narrative and her biological father who served alongside him. So the horrors of war and its aftermath are uppermost in this novel.

Not such an unusual story but I was prepared to become immersed in the family’s experience. This is exactly where I had a major problem with it, though, and none of its characters or their relationships really engaged me. As a travelogue with a strong emphasis on landscape and regional food, I thought it worked well, but I’m not sure that was the author’s intention.