Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Shape of a Boy: My Family and Other Adventures’ by Kate Wickers.
Thanks to Claire Maxwell for inviting me onto the tour and for my copy of the book for review – as always, opinions are entirely my own.
I’ll admit that I’m an armchair traveller – Covid, airport chaos and a distinct lack of cash make it much more feasible than actual travelling! However, I’m quite picky about who I want to travel with, both literally and in literary terms – but Kate Wickers makes a good guide.
This book covers Wickers’ travels with her children (3 sons) over the span of their childhoods. Starting with Israel and Jordan when Wickers was carrying her first son, this book takes us through lots of adventurous and amazing trips right up to the final one in the collection, Cuba, when the eldest is 18. It’s fair to say that Wickers is pretty fearless in her choice of destination as she, husband Neil, and the children head off to places as diverse as Thailand and Mexico, Borneo and Japan, Tanzania and Cambodia. She seems to like nothing more than somewhere totally off the beaten track which makes for interesting reading – and some memorable family holidays.
If anyone is equipped for such intrepid exploring, it’s Wickers. She’s a travel journalist with a lot of experience and so can make the best out of each adventure – lots of local guides and immersion in local culture make the travel aspect of the book interesting and give a good flavour of each place. It did make me want to go to some of the places – more the riads of Morocco than the bat poo caves of Borneo though!
The real stars of the book though are Wickers’ three boys – it was lovely to see the adventures through their eyes as they became accustomed to some of their mother’s eccentric holiday choices. Some fabulous experiences for them are described (safaris, various animal encounters, great food), albeit sometimes tempered by some rather less fabulous ones (camel burgers, the yoga retreat, the aforementioned bat poo cave…) Throughout, Wickers describes them and their reactions with affection, wit and honesty. For the reader, it’s like becoming part of the family – and, as someone married to an accident-prone man, Wickers’ husband Neil seemed very familiar!
Each of the chapters is subtitled with the lesson learned on the trip – from the social etiquette of Japan to the rather more earthy lessons gained from watching animals do what they do (*ahem*) in Tanzania. This makes an engaging structure to the book as each trip reveals more of the world’s wisdom gained through travel.
If you enjoy travel writing, there’s lots to like here – it’s well-written and Wickers has an eye for a humorous detail. It will make you want to travel and (as much as I hate this phrase) ‘make memories’ with your own family before time runs out and the kids are all grown – the inevitable bittersweet end to childhood and this book.
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Header photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash
