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    The Gap Year
    The Gap Year
    The Gap Year
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Gap Year

    Written by Sarah Bird

    Narrated by Christina Moore and Jennifer Ikeda

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Sarah Bird is acclaimed for her multi-layered novels that are at once hilarious and moving. Here Bird examines "the ever-deepening mysteries of parents and children as they grow up and apart" (Publishers Weekly). Working single-mother Cam Lightsey is proud to give her daughter Aubrey a chance at a good education. But when Aubrey turns her attention away from college and toward a boy at school, their once solid mother-daughter relationship quickly begins to crumble. ". wry and funny . Sure to please Bird's fans."-Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 11, 2012
    ISBN9781461847854
    Author

    Sarah Bird

    Sarah Bird’s novel, Above the East China Sea, was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. A Dobie-Paisano Fellowship helped in researching Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen. Raised in an Air Force family on bases around the world, Sarah is the child of two warriors, a WWII Army nurse and an Air Corps bombardier, who met at a barn dance in North Africa. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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    Reviews for The Gap Year

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Book had an irresistible description to me, as a mom of 2 daughters ("oh please please don't let some dumb boy ruin my baby's future" is a thought that runs through my head frequently). It was a good book but the last third of it dragged.
    • 4/5
      I couldn't make it through Bird's last novel, How Perfect Is That, so The Gap Year, just by being finish-able, already made me much happier as a reader. I struggled with Bird's main adult character, Cam. Her litany of worries and regrets about her relationship with her daughter were, while understandable, at times manic and overwhelming. Hectic, to borrow her daughter's signature word. Perhaps I'll feel differently when I am a parent. Bird's treatment of that daughter, Aubrey, however, with her apathy and desires sometimes at war with each other, rang very true to me and felt both poignant and powerful. I also enjoyed the structure of alternating narrators (Cam and Aubrey) that Bird used, and appreciated the two distinct voices and how both revealed layers of the story. And while I found Cam's narrative sometimes annoying in the first half of the novel, her path towards growth as the story reached its conclusion was quite satisfying. I really like Bird's insistence that growth isn't just for her adolescent characters, it's possible and even necessary for the adults as well.
    • 3/5
      Ienjoy Sarah Bird's humor. This book is agreat read and demonstrates well how teenagers go from being dependant to independant in their final year in high school which can be very painful for parents and in this instance for a single mother. I like how the author goes back and forth between the narrative of the voices of Cam and Aubrey.
    • 5/5
      Cam was deeply in love with her husband, Martin, their two-year-old, Aubrey, and their life as a family, when Martin left them to join a cult called "Next", severing ties with them for 16 years. As Aubrey approaches her high school graduation, Cam, a lactation consultant, prepares herself for Aubrey's transition to college. Aubrey, however, has other plans and spends her senior year falling in love with the captain of the football team and secretly communicating with Martin, who has contacted her under a secret name via Facebook. The story alternates narrators as the present is told by Cam and the approaching/preceding year is narrated by Aubrey. I LOVED this book! I really enjoyed both Cam and Aubrey and seeing their alternating perspectives and how they fit together was fun and interesting, as each person wrongly assumed and also deeply understood the perspective of the other. I truly identified with Cam, as I also have a daughter in high school and I could understand the challenges of starting to let go, worrying about your child's wellbeing, and also re-examining your life choices. There was a lot of humor in this book, as the witty dialogue between Cam and Dori (her best friend) and Cam and Martin, was quite entertaining. I also enjoyed the budding relationship between Aubrey and Tyler, which was both sweet and heartwarming. I strongly recommend this story, particularly for someone who may be approaching their own empty nest.
    • 5/5
      I loved, loved, loved this book! Was it because my brain buzzes with worries just as irrational as Camille's? Because of the witty and wry humor throughout the novel? Because, even though the book is set in "Parkhaven" I could recognize bits and pieces of Austin sprinkled throughout? Probably all of the above, and more.... The kindle version is great as well, with a reader's guide included at the end, location links to quotes in the readers' guide questions, and suggestions for future reading.
    • 3/5
      I had a hard time reading this book. It didn't really keep my interest to well. I think that I was expecting more about the struggles of a mother - daughter relationship then a women who isn't really happy with her life. "The Gap Year" was a little to Chick-Lit for my taste but not a bad book.
    • 4/5
      Dreams. Growing up. Relationships. Food Trucks. Cults. Secrets. Lactation Coaches. Decision-making.

      I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed this tale of a mother-daughter relationship, told from both point-of-views. Told in a non-linear fashion, you learn about a mother and daughter trying to deal with their relationship, as well as forming new ones with others. Really well done as even with tension between the characters you really felt for both Aubrey and Cam, no matter what they were doing to each other and how they felt about the conflict. You didn't really side with either, yet you empathized completely with where they were coming from.

      At one point, it made me never want to have children due to the conflict, yet by the end it portrayed the good and bad in a balanced manner, making me re-think that.
    • 4/5
      I started this book expecting a standard chick-lit-esque story of a teenage girl yearning to escape the nest and her over-protective mother who can't let go. While that plotline does exist within the book, Sarah Bird has crafted a delightful novel with so many more nuances and layers than that first bare-bones description could convey. The novel is told from both Cam's (the mom) and Aubrey's (the daughter) perspectives; it also shifts in time over the course of Aubrey's senior year of high school. Aubrey's voice is especially well-done - Bird clearly has a very strong awareness of the realities of late adolescence! I found all of the characters to be interesting and well-written, from Cam, the lactaction-consultant/single mom, to Dori, her ageing hippie friend, to Aubrey and Tyler, two teenagers struggling to become individuals in the shadow of so many people's great expectations. This book was, at turns, laugh-out-loud funny, tender, and even heartbreaking. I think Bird got to the heart of the tough relationship between mother and daughter, and the painful reality that sometimes what we most desperately want is unachievable, and may not be the right thing for us anyway. She explores the many 'gaps' in our lives, and how normal families try to fill them, with gentle humor and compassion. This is the first book I've read by Sarah Bird, but it won't be the last. I give it 4 stars.
    • 4/5
      Something changes in kids during the final year of high school before they go off to college or take a gap year, marking the start of their adult lives. Perhaps these (unintentional) changes are a way of making the break that they must make an easier one. I know that my mom was not ready to have me leave for college until she endured my senior year in high school, certain that I had morphed into a terror. (And let me note for the record that I was overall a very good and easy kid compared to many.) I do not look forward to my own children, who grow ever closer to this age, doing the same shutting-out and shutting-down that I did and that is so stereotypical of 17-18 year old kids. Yet I happily chose to read a book about just this situation. Perhaps you could call it being forewarned and forearmed. Or maybe it will be, as the main character explains at one point, my "at least," as in "at least my kid isn't like that." Cam Lightsey is a single mom who works as a lactation consultant. She has been raising daughter Aubrey alone since her ex, Martin, an attorney, left her to join a Scientology-like cult called Next! where he protects high profile Hollywood Nextarians. Aubrey was only two when Martin left and has no memories of him but she's now having conversations with him on Facebook behind her mother's back. While Cam ignores Aubrey's growing apathy to college, Aubrey is making her own plans for her future, ones that include her boyfriend, the high school football star, Tyler Moldenhauer. The disconnect between this mother and daughter, who were once so close, silently grows. Narrated by both Cam and by Aubrey, the timelines of their narration are completely different. Cam tells of the present, the summer after Aubrey's graduation, as alone, she buys all of the things that she imagines Aubrey will need once she boards that plane for college. Aubrey, meanwhile narrates the fall prior to this post-high school summer, when she gives up band and falls for Tyler, and in the process drastically changes who she's always been. In each of their narratives, it is possible to see all the places that things have gone wrong between mother and daughter. Cam wonders if Aubrey's life would have taken the path that she, Cam, wanted had Martin been present in their lives or if they had not moved to the suburbs to send Aubrey to better schools or even if she had just insisted that Aubrey see a doctor after suffering heat exhuastion at band boot camp. Bird has done a fanastic job of capturing the insecurities of a mother second-guessing herself, only wanting her daughter to succeed and to have the life that Cam has sacrificed so much to provide. That Aubrey wants a different life is what Cam is having such a difficult time seeing and accepting with grace. Aubrey, who was once so open with her mother, retreated, withheld, and turned sullen her final year in school seemingly inexplicably and so Cam blames this transformation on boyfriend Tyler. In fact, Aubrey's narration shows that her withdrawal from her mother is simply a growing up and growing into adulthood. The only way that she feels that she can do that is by becoming secretive and breaking the bond she and Cam have shared for so long. This is, of course, not the only route to adulthood, but it is such a common one because the self-centeredness of teens makes them believe that their parent(s) will accept their self-sufficiency, personal choices, and change no other way. Again, Bird has captured this beautifully. While the main narrative about the growing, yawning gap between Cam and Aubrey is very well done, the secondary characters are little more than shadows. Even Aubrey's boyfriend Tyler, whose revelations to Aubrey about his past are seminal to the story, is little more than a place holder. Cam's ex and Aubrey's father never quite develops beyond the wishy-washy picture-less Facebook writer, certainly not to the point that it is understandable why Cam still carries a torch for him all these years after his abandonment. But these characters are truly secondary to the main thrust of the novel, which Bird does get right. A very readable, enjoyable novel about communication, misunderstanding, letting go, and growing up, this would be a perfect book for those taking a child off to school for the first time. A reminder that our children's lives are not our own and that they will forge their own path as adults, this is funny, heatbreaking, and poignant in equal measure. Sarah Bird has delivered a bittersweet page-turner that will leave you sympathizing with both Cam and Aubrey as they each face a new chapter in life.