I realize I've only recently reviewed Dave Egger's 'A hologram for the king', but thought this one as well is worth briefly describing. Like 'Hologram', this is about the spiritual growth of a middle aged person on a trip far from home.  This time the main character is Josie, a forty-something dentist, who is fleeing a relationship with Carl, her live-in lover of many years who has moved to Florida and is now engaged to a younger woman, her dental practice which is being destroyed by a malpractice suit, and the stultifying life in a small Ohio town.  She goes to Alaska, as far as she can go in America without leaving the continent, and travels in a rented RV known as 'the Chateau' with her eight year old son and five year old daughter.  In a way, it is a 'road trip story', a  picaresque chronicle of her dealing with all sorts of eccentric characters. There was 'Grenada Jim' the ex-marine RV park manager with whom she had a brief liaison in a lawn chair outside her camper, Charlie, who loves magic shows on cruise ships, and the prison inmate conscripted into being a temporary fireman, who fixed her flat tire.  And then there were confrontations with forest fires, avalanches and snowstorms. The interesting thing is that what began as an attempt to escape gradually turns into self-discovery. She learns that what she had been looking for outside in another person could actually be inside herself: 'Josie knew, then, that better than searching for a person of courage—she’d been on this search for years, dear god—better and possibly easier than searching for such people in the extant world was to create them. She didn’t need to find humans of integrity and courage. She needed to make them.' Like all good books, this one can be read on different levels. It is an entertaining account of madcap adventures up north, and at the same time is a story of personal growth. And lest it seem too simple, at the end, as Josie, having successfully battled a snowstorm warms herself in front of a fire, feeling content, the author reminds us: 'But then there is tomorrow.'