Amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter, a husband and doctor, is left caring for his infant daughter when his wife Sonia abandons him on a quest for healing and freedom. She describes herself as a traveller, and leaves under the guise of wanting to go on a journey. However, her reasons are more deeply rooted than a simple desire: she is completely disconnected from everything she thought she knew and is quietly suffocating. Her need for distance isn’t solely geographic, either; it’s also a desperate search for something more abstract. However, as fleeing is rarely the solution, she must come to terms with the life she abandoned when things take a drastic turn at home.
Lin Betancourt’s THE TRAVELLER expertly tells the story of two people struggling to hold onto their love amid communication gaps and unaddressed trauma. It’s a poignant story that fluidly moves from Peter’s perspective to Sonia’s, allowing readers to be immersed in their worlds. On Peter’s side, he’s struggling to tend to their child with one hand while desperately reaching out to Sonia and extending forgiveness (even though he doesn’t understand what’s happening to the life they’ve built) with the other hand. In doing this, his loneliness and confusion creep in loudly. On Sonia’s side, it’s a battle with the mocking voice of trauma: a need to recognize herself and feel some form of connection with people—something she struggles to feel even toward herself. In one instance, she remarks, “I look like a kangaroo wearing scrubs.” This is only one of such wry observations, and it’s consistent with her unfiltered voice—as she hides nothing and does nothing to appear well.
The alternating perspective allows readers to get a good sense of both characters and understand their pain. This means that readers don’t jump to conclusions on who is right or wrong. Sonia’s reflections on motherhood, grief, and past violations are achingly real. In one especially moving scene, Peter asks her why she kept silent about what she’d been through, and her reply is a single sentence that captures a form of shame and fear that resonates: “If I told you, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”
However, some supporting characters feel underdeveloped, such as Yonatan: an important character in Sonia’s emotional journey. Not enough is known about him, as he’s defined solely by her perception of him. Similarly, a charged confrontation with her parents dissipates too quickly. This leaves unignorable emotional threads dangling in a scene rich with potential for deeper reckoning—especially in a story so attuned to psychological nuance.
Betancourt’s prose blurs the line between memory and present, in tune with Sonia’s mental state. Settings, whether a sterile hospital or an anonymous hiking trail, feel like extensions of her dislocation. At times, Sonia’s self-justifications are cyclical and dull the impact of her revelations, but this novel nevertheless captures the fragile hope of return amid abandonment by a spouse and the desperate search to recognize oneself in the face of trauma.
Lin Betancourt’s THE TRAVELLER is, above all, a novel about the distances between people and the harder, quieter distances within ourselves. Betancourt doesn’t offer easy resolutions, but she does something rarer: she renders the messy, uneven work of healing with unflinching tenderness.
~Gabriella Harrison for IndieReader