The Fish Ladder

June 8, 2015
In this engaging story full of old Welsh and Scottish names, British film editor Norbury uses the search for the source of a river—physically as well as metaphorically—to convey the need for finding her birth mother. The notion of following a river to its source grew from reading the novel The Well at the World’s End by the Scottish writer Neil M. Gunn. Norburry set out several times, either alone or with her nine-year-old daughter, Evie, to find these sources—of Dunbeath Water, Scotland, mentioned in the novel, and also many rivers near Norbury’s summer cottage in Wales and family home in Cheshire, England. A miscarriage of a baby she eagerly wanted triggered thoughts of her own adoption. She also recalls her long-ago visit to the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, outside of Liverpool on the Mersey River, where she learned from the nuns that she was in fact a cherished baby and cared for by Sister Marie Therese. There are many moments of extraordinary synergy in this limpid, patiently meandering narrative, and Norbury manages to incorporate them in a natural, light-pedaling fashion. Her search for her biological mother, the sudden ill health of her beloved adopted mother, and Norbury’s discovery of a tumor lodged deep in her own rib cage all shape an extraordinary and moving journey.

Starred review from May 15, 2015
British writer Norbury's debut memoir takes readers on vigorous walks through lochs, rivers, and soggy marshes in Scotland, England, and Wales. Adopted by loving parents and unable to identify, not for lack of trying, her birth parents, the author found that the inability to construct her family's story left her "dizzyingly adrift," living with her writer husband and their daughter Evie in both Spain and England. A miscarriage, as well as the loss of her father years before, deepened her loneliness. Inspired by Neil M. Gunn's novel The Well at the World's End, Norbury was intuitively drawn to the idea of walking from the mouth of a river to its source. For starters, she and Evie walked the banks of Afon Geirch, which runs into Cable Bay in Wales, where the family has a summer cottage. Though thwarted by fences and mud, she was not deterred. Following her expeditions could send readers to an old-fashioned atlas that includes the many bodies of water she encountered, including Dunbeath Water, near Spey, Scotland, where the "well at the world's end" supposedly exists. Whether the well is real or fictional hardly matters. It's the journey that counts. Norbury, whose background includes film editing for the BBC, stirs the imagination with descriptive passages-"Salt-white boulders lined a powdery shore of crystal sand, unmarked and clean, its whiteness stained to the colour of cork by the peat"-and her many digressions delight. For example, there is the tale of Boand, the goddess who went to seek a forbidden well in the land beyond her own, and that of her aunt's flirtation (or was it an affair?) with a fisherman. All the stories circle back to themes of loneliness, yearning, and self-discovery. As the fish ladder enables salmon to swim upstream, Norbury's treks helped her come to terms with the circumstances of her birth. A beautifully written book about a journey through wild places in the landscape and the heart.

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November 1, 2015

Recovering from the death of her child in utero and from enduring the pregnancy until it ended naturally a month after that, Norbury becomes fixated on a book she read years before, which describes following a river from its mouth to its source. At the same time, her loss has made her more interested in her own birth and adoption, and the two compulsions come together when she sets off on natural explorations in the British countryside with her daughter, and finds her birthplace--a convent--and nuns who remember her as a baby. The bulk of the account, the woodsy writing about the natural world and other themes such as Celtic myths, is dreamlike and lovely; these make the book more suited to nature readers than to adoptees. At the same time, nature lovers won't necessarily want to read about adoption. VERDICT This account is well written but will struggle to find an audience.--Henrietta Verma, Library JournalMolly

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