Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
Publisher: Sidekick Press, (March 30, 2021) Category: Memoir, Travel, Family Travel, Adventure Travel, Grief Tour dates: January 17-February 18, 2022 ISBN: 978-1734494556 Available in Print and ebook, 272 pages
Description Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Have you ever wished you could run away and leave your life behind? Born on the “Day of the Wanderer,” Lisa Dailey has always been filled with wanderlust. Although she and her husband had planned to take their family on a ’round-the-world adventure, she didn’t expect their plans to come together on the heels of grief, after losing seven family members in five years.
Square Up shows us that travel not only helps us understand and appreciate other cultures, but invites us to find compassion and wisdom, heal from our losses, and discover our capacity for forgiveness, as well as joy.
My Thoughts Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Lisa Daily and her husband, Ray, have always loved to travel and had planned on taking the two young teenaged boys on a trip. However, in the period of 5 years, she lost seven loved ones, including her parents and younger brother. Grief and depression struck and put her in a rut. After awhile, her husband brought up the idea of traveling again. With gentle persuasion, she finally agreed. They both wanted to show their boys parts unknow to them.
Since Ray was in the military, the family mostly flew in military planes to keep the cost down. She explains how terribly uncomfortable and cold these planes are and highly recommends bringing a blanket and dressing warm.
The family traveled all over Asia. They took a longer stop in Vietnam and Cambodia so Ray could volunteer since he is also a dentist. I loved her descriptions of all the places they travel over the period of 7 months. One of my favorite stories from the family’s travels was of the Rat Temple in Deshnoke, India. The rats, over 25,000 of them are believed to be ancestors, reborn as rats. As with any Hindu temple you visit, you must remove your shoes before going inside. So, there are rats crawling over your feet and even nibbling on occasion. You can also buy food outside, to feed the rats. I love animals but I will not be going their! LOL!
Towards the end of their journey and with a lot of hassle getting special travel visa, the went to Ghana in Africa. Ray was to volunteer doing dentistry there as well. Once there, they found out there were even more road blocks to him volunteering.
Though there were a lot of difficulties in the 7 months, the family persevered and Lisa started dealing with her grief in a more positive way. Right after I started reading ‘Square Up’, my sister passed away. She was the 5th death in 3 years for me. Four of them were in the last year. So, I had to stop reading the book for awhile. It was triggering for me at the time. However, I am so glad I picked it back up! I love the lessons Lisa learned during the journey and I think some have rubbed off on me.
If you love reading travel adventures, you will love this book! If you have suffered loss, there are lessons to be learned here! I loved this book so much that I am sure I will read it again. Because there are so many books, I want to read I rarely read the same book twice! I highly recommend ‘Square Up’ and give it 5 out of 5 stars.
I received the eBook for my honest opinion.
About Lisa Dailey
Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world and she continues to enrich her life through travel. She is currently working on a recipe anthology as well as her first work of fiction. A native Montanan,
Lisa now makes her home by the ocean in Bellingham, Washington, but returns to her roots every summer for a healthy dose of mountains and Big Sky.
Lisa is the owner of Silent Sidekick and Sidekick Press where she helps guide authors through their publishing journey.
This giveaway is for 3 print copies One for each of 3 winners. This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on February 12, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
Publisher: Sidekick Press, (March 30, 2021) Category: Memoir, Travel, Family Travel, Adventure Travel, Grief Tour dates: January 17-February 18, 2022 ISBN: 978-1734494556 Available in Print and ebook, 272 pages
Description Square Up by Lisa Dailey
Have you ever wished you could run away and leave your life behind? Born on the “Day of the Wanderer,” Lisa Dailey has always been filled with wanderlust. Although she and her husband had planned to take their family on a ’round-the-world adventure, she didn’t expect their plans to come together on the heels of grief, after losing seven family members in five years.
Square Up shows us that travel not only helps us understand and appreciate other cultures, but invites us to find compassion and wisdom, heal from our losses, and discover our capacity for forgiveness, as well as joy.
Praise Square Up by Lisa Dailey
“Lisa Dailey weaves an extraordinary and fascinating tale of her journey around the world with her family. But this is far more than a travel story; it’s a merciful, compassionate story of how traveling experiences can offer insight, perspective, and healing. As a therapist, I can say that I’d recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with profound loss or serious anxiety. It is a story of self-compassion, not self-pity, with moments of charm and humor that delight throughout. If you loved Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, you’ll adore this story.”-Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, author of Filling Her Shoes
“Lisa Dailey is a woman after my own heart. She understands that both the discomfort and adventure of travel can change-and heal-us. In Square Up, in the throes of grief after several family deaths, Lisa and her husband, Ray, take their children around the world to places as far-flung as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Ghana. For the rest of her family, the trip is an opportunity to see the world and stretch their worldview (they visit a temple filled with rats and venture into the culinary enterprise of eating tarantulas, after all). And while all of this is riveting, indeed a treat for lovers of travel writing, what really captures the heart in this memoir is the way the narrator finds her way, after nearly being crushed by her recent losses, to peace of mind and self-compassion. Square Up is full of grace and love and gentle warmth-an authentic story of love of self, family, and, of course, travel.”-Cami Ostman, author of Second Wind: One Woman’s Midlife Quest to Run Seven Marathons on Seven Continents
Square Up by Lisa A Dailey is a memoir that will capture the hearts of fans of travel and adventure, but the story is far more spiritual than entertaining. Dailey shares her grief and the pain she experienced after losing family members within five years—her parents and twenty-three-old brother included. The void their loss left in her heart was huge. But then traveling around the world with her family—her husband and two sons—changed everything. They had planned the trip for years and had looked forward to it with excitement. In seven months, this family would travel to thirteen countries and across four continents. What makes it a unique experience? There is a lot of excitement reading this book as the reader follows the itinerary of the author and her family, but there is far more to that. Lisa A Dailey’s travels across different countries brought her into contact with different cultures and people, and the encounter with new places, with nature, with people, provoked something deeper in her, an inner journey towards healing. Lisa A Dailey understood that the world is filled with life and a lot to celebrate, and each step they took away from home led her further away from her pain. The author writes in a mesmerizing and exciting voice and it is interesting to follow how she explores her emotions. Square Up is observant and the author pays attention to detail, offering tips that travelers can use and recreating wonderful sights that readers would want to visit. It is both entertaining and very informative.”- Ruffina Oserio, Readers’ Favorite
“For someone who hasn’t traveled more than a few miles from she was born (that would be me) this book was a grand adventure around the world. I enjoyed myself immensely as I was able to touch, taste, smell and see each destination and it’s mysteries through the narrators stunning descriptions. As well, the underlying story of how the narrator struggled with her deep sense of grief mixed with anger at all the loss of life she’d witnessed, tugged at my heart strings. This story will allure you with its travel, break you open with it’s pain and send you away feeling stronger and more hopeful than ever before.”- Lorinda Boyer, Author of Straight Enough: A Memoir
Interview With Lisa Dailey
TR: Please tell us something about Square Up that is not in the summary. (About the book, “character” you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
LD: Wow, where to begin… In writing the memoir, I had to make sure that the story had an arc and that the scenes and locations I picked to write about were relevant to either the story arc or the character arc. Though I cover a little bit of a lot of places, there were many, many more stops that didn’t make the book. The book ends in Spain, but in reality, we continued on the trip for several more weeks. We made a stop in Switzerland to see my husband’s college roommate and his family in Baden. We continued to Germany to fly home from Ramstein Air Force Base, but first we drove to Hannover to see our exchange student daughter who we had hosted a couple of years before the trip. Both visits were a nice precursor to our return to reality in the U.S.
TR: How long did it take you to write this book from concept to fruition?
LD: I blogged about the entire trip as we were travelling as a way to keep friends and family back home up to date on our location and activities. When I returned home, I thought I could just compile those blog posts into one document, do a little editing, and call it a blog. But I soon realized that the blog posts told the “what” part of the journey, but it was missing the “so what” portion. I then enrolled in a 9-month get your book done program and completed a first draft and then a second. After revisions, sending my work through a critique group twice, and a developmental edit, I published in March 2021, almost exactly 5 years from the date we returned home.
TR: You share a lot about your family and family losses you have gone through in such a short time. How did your family react when you told them you were writing this, Square Up?
LD: I was most concerned about my husband and kids, but they were all supportive. I suspect they had become used to my writing about our family in a public arena. And one must remember when reading a blog or a memoir that the author is giving you a view of their lives through one window. It is not their entire life. For my family, I definitely didn’t pull back the curtains on their personal lives beyond some of their interactions with me. And the family members that I did write about more were those that had passed but still had a hold on me.
TR: How did your life as a mother influence your writing of Square Up?
LD: Interesting question. The first draft of the book didn’t include my children. I didn’t want to put their lives on paper without them having a say in it. But when I put the first chapters through critique, everyone agreed that something was missing and because the kids were part of the journey, they needed to be part of the story. So, I spoke with the boys and talked about what I was doing and how I would portray them, and they both agreed it would be fine to be included. Ultimately, they are minor supporting characters, but I agree that their presence in the story was necessary.
TR: What inspired you to write?
LD: I’ve always been a voracious reader and writer. For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of writing books. Square Up was not the first book I thought I would write, however. I’d had a novel I’d been playing around with long before the trip. But when I came back from seven months away from my life, I needed a way to process what it all meant and out of that came the memoir.
TR: How much time and effort went into writing Square Up? Did you do any research for the book?
LD: I did quite a bit of research on all of the places that I included in the book. I had all my journal and blogging notes on cities and location names, but I had to dig into the history to tell a deeper story (along with proper spellings and distances to make sure I got everything right).
TR: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?
LD: I spoke at length to a cover designer about the story and left the concept up to her. I was reluctant to put my face on the cover at first, but when she explained how it fit with the personal side of my story, I was all for it. The stupa also plays a big part in the story and the stupa image on the cover is one we took on the trip.
TR: What is next for Lisa Dailey? Do you have another book in mind or other project?
LD: I have two books I am currently working on. One is a fictional family saga set in present-day eastern Montana. This is the book that I’ve been writing in my head for probably 25 years. Now it is starting to take shape on paper!
The second book is a cookbook all about soup, though I may start blogging about this first before turning into book form. The concept for this one is that I think it used to be special to go out to dinner and now the tables have turned and it’s special to be able to prepare a home cooked meal. Soup is a great gateway into the cooking arena. You can tailor soup to your own taste preferences and if something goes wrong, you can easily fix it.
About Lisa Dailey
Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world and she continues to enrich her life through travel. She is currently working on a recipe anthology as well as her first work of fiction. A native Montanan,
Lisa now makes her home by the ocean in Bellingham, Washington, but returns to her roots every summer for a healthy dose of mountains and Big Sky.
Lisa is the owner of Silent Sidekick and Sidekick Press where she helps guide authors through their publishing journey.
This giveaway is for 3 print copies One for each of 3 winners. This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on February 12, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Thanks to the author, I am giving away one print copy of ‘Adventure by Chicken Bus’ by Janet Losole.
Description Adventure by Chicken Bus by Janet Losole
Embarking on a homeschooling field trip to Central America is stressful enough, but add in perilous bridge crossings, trips to the hospital, and a lack of women’s underwear, and you have the makings of an Adventure by Chicken Bus. Buckling under a mountain of debt, Janet LoSole and her family are at their wits’ end. Determined to make a drastic change, they sell all worldly possessions and hit the road. With only a few items of clothing, a four-person tent, and little else, the family visits a sleepy island backwater in Costa Rica to save endangered sea turtles.
In Panama, they bounce around like turnips in the back of a vegetable truck to reach an isolated monkey sanctuary. In Guatemala, they scale the ancient Mayan temples of Tikal. In between tales of begging rides from total strangers and sleeping overnight in the jungle with an indigenous family, Janet endorses community-based travel–supporting local businesses and favoring public transportation called chicken buses. She also writes candidly about what it takes to travel long-term with two little girls amid the chaos of border crossings, erratic drivers, and creepy crawlies lurking at the edge of the jungle.
Praise Adventure by Chicken Bus by Janet Losole
“”Helping children learn without school is always an adventure. Doing it while backpacking and adjusting to and respecting foreign cultures makes it an epic adventure. This family’s story will keep you spellbound. It will make you laugh, cry, and hold your breath in fear, and help you appreciate both the value and joy of learning from life.”” —Wendy Priesnitz, editor of Life Learning Magazine
“”Buckle up for an unforgettable ride; an emotional journey that takes the reader on an exciting family adventure like no other!”” —Alan Mallory, author of The Family that Conquered Everest
“”Brave and inspiring, Adventure by Chicken Bus immediately draws you in with its honesty and color. . . . This book has so many important messages about parenting, caring for the planet, and daring to strive for something more from life.”” —Mia Taylor, award-winning senior staff writer for TravelPulse
About Janet Losole
Janet LoSole is a freelance writer living in Ontario, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in French Linguistics from York University in Toronto and a Bachelor of Education Degree from Nipissing University. She is a certified TESOL instructor and has taught ESL internationally since 1994.
She began homeschooling her daughters in 1997. She writes about traveling with children and homeschooling. Her work has been published in: Canada’s Education Magazine, Natural Parent Magazine, The Alliance for Self-Directed Education, Outdoor Families Online, Unravel, and elsewhere.
Square Up: 50,000 miles in search of a way home by Lisa Dailey
Adventure by Chicken Bus by Janet Losole