Message from a Blue Jay - Love, Loss, and One Writer's Journey Home

ABOUT Faye Rapoport DesPres

Faye Rapoport DesPres
Born in New York City, Faye Rapoport DesPres was raised in a rural area of upstate New York. Her maternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s and settled in the South Bronx, where her mother was raised. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in Ne More...

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Description

From an astonishing blue jay to a lone humpback whale, from the back roads of her home town to the streets of Jerusalem and the Tower of London, debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres examines a modern life marked by a passion for the natural world, unexpected love, and shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully-crafted memoir-in-essays.

Three weeks before she turns forty, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that soon won't exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and to find the real reasons she never settled down. The choices she makes from that moment on lead her to re-trace her steps both in the States and abroad as she attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself moving forward to new love, shocking loss, and finally, in a way that she never expects, to a place that she can almost call home.

Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of such rising contemporary writers as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will appreciate Faye's observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.