Description
2016 Best Book Award Finalist, Autobiography/Memoirs
2016 Foreward INDIE Awards Finalist, Nature
2016 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Medal Winner, Death & Dying/Grief & Loss
2017 IPPY Bronze Medal Winner, Best Regional Non-Fiction: Mid-Atlantic
“A highly engaging memoir, a fine blend of life’s images and passages. Her redeeming discovery of the Southeast’s remote Blue Ridge outback enfolds a journey through joy and family tragedy. Marcia Mabee’s pace doesn’t falter, but she knows when to slow the story, for vivid details about both personal and natural history. Deeply felt, well told.”
—Stephen Nash, 2015 winner, American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award for Virginia Climate Fever: How Global Warming Will Transform Our Cities, Shorelines, and Forests.
“Conservationists, bird-lovers, healthcare advocates, and cancer patients will be touched and educated by this love story composed by a cancer survivor, a cancer caregiver, and a woman on a road to recovery.”
—Susan Gubar, author of the Living with Cancer blog for The New York Times
“A passionate conservationist, Mabee finds her commitment to survival of the endangered cruelly tested as she battles her way through ovarian cancer, only to have news of her hard-won remission upstaged by a shock bulletin: her husband has pancreatic cancer. As she navigates the onslaught of illness, death, and grief, Mabee offers a compelling portrait of love, tenacity, and resilience that will inspire both those who ail and those who mourn.”
—Jill Smolowe, author of Four Funerals and a Wedding
“Marcia Mabee is a professional working woman, wife, environmentalist, stepmother, entrepreneur, and cancer warrior. She provides an honest and raw account of both the successes and the limitations of cancer treatment. This is a book worth reading for anyone who has struggled with grief and personal challenges. I highly recommend it.”
—Deborah K. Armstrong, M.D., Professor of Oncology, Gynecology and Obstetrics, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center
“What starts out as one man’s romantic gesture to impress the woman he loves, the purchase of a mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, eventually turns into a shared love of another kind. What emerges is an enormous challenge to preserve the unique botanical treasures of the land they acutely love and then the challenge to survive cancer. Mabee’s grit and resolve are a source of wonder, a haunting testament to the fortitude of the human spirit.”
—Barbara Donsky, author of Veronica’s Grave
“This is a memoir of love, place and a chance to love again.”
—Northern Virginia Magazine
“Keep the Kleenex handy, for Mabee’s tribute to Tim’s love and life is so profound and poignantly rendered that it is impossible not to be moved to tears. Yet for all the tragedy that engulfed their lives, what endured was the mountain, and what sustained them was the serenity and beauty found within its hills.”
—Booklist
