The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

Cam has raised her daughter Aubrey alone ever since her ex left to join a cult. But now the bond between mother and daughter seems to have disappeared. While Cam is frantic to see Aubrey, a straight-A student, at the perfect college, on a path that Cam is sure will provide her daughter success and happiness, Aubrey suddenly shows no interest in her mother’s plans. Even the promise of an exciting gap year saving baby seals or bringing clean water to remote villages hasn’t tempted her. She prefers pursuing a life with her wrong-side-of-the-tracks football-hero boyfriend and her own secret hopes. Both mourn the gap that has grown between them, but Cam and Aubrey seem locked in a fight without a winner. Can they both learn how to hold onto dreams . . . and when to let go to grasp something better? Sarah Bird’s trademark laugh-out-loud humor joins with the tears that accompany love in a combination that reveals the fragile yet tough bonds of mother and daughter.

Genres: Fiction, Chick Lit, Contemporary, Young Adult, Adult, Adult Fiction, Ebooks

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 5, 2011

About the author

Sarah Bird is a bestselling novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and journalist who has lived in Austin, Texas since long before the city became internationally cool. She has published ten novels and two books of essays. Her eleventh novel, LAST DANCE ON THE STARLITE PIER--a gripping tale set in the secret world of the dance marathons of the Great Depression--will be released on April 12th.

Her last novel, DAUGHTER OF A DAUGHTER OF A QUEEN--inspired by the true story of the only woman to serve with the legendary Buffalo Soldiers--was named an All-time Best Books about Texas by the Austin American-Statesman; Best Fiction of 2018, Christian Science Monitor; Favorite Books of 2018, Texas Observer; a One City, One Book choice of seven cities; and a Lit Lovers Book Club Favorites.

Sarah was a finalist for The Dublin International Literary Award; an ALEX award winner; Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a two-time winner of the TIL’s Best Novel award; a B&N’s Discover Great Writers selection; a New York Public Libraries Books to Remember; an honoree of theTexas Writers Hall of Fame; an Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; and an Austin Libraries Illumine Award for Excellence in Fiction winner. In 2014 she was named Texas Writer of the Year by the Texas Book Festival and presented with a pair of custom-made boots on the floor of the Texas Senate Chamber.

Sarah is a nine-time winner of Austin Best Fiction Writer award. She was recently honored with the University of New Mexico’s 2020 Paul Ré Award for Cultural Advocacy. In 2015 Sarah was one of eight winners selected from 3,800 entries to attend the Meryl Streep Screenwriters’ Lab. Sarah was chosen in 2017 to represent the Austin Public Library as the hologram/greeter installed in the Austin Downtown Library. Sarah was a co-founder of The Writers League of Texas.

She has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller; a writer for Oprah’s Magazine, NY Times Sunday Magazine and Op Ed columns, Chicago Tribune, Real Simple, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Salon, Daily Beast, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, MS, Texas Observer; Alcalde and a columnist for years for Texas Monthly. As a screenwriter, she worked on projects for Warner Bros., Paramount, CBS, National Geographic, Hallmark, ABC, TNT, as well as several independent producers.

She and her husband enjoy open-water swimming and training their corgi puppy not to eat the furniture.

Reviews

[Sarah Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my therapy book. I wrote it to help myself understand all the strange symptoms I experienced around the time my only child left for college. Real Estate Regret was a big one. I'd drive around town imagining all the vastly better lives we could have had if we'd lived in different neighborhoods and gone to different schools. Very odd. But writing "The Gap Year" did help me so, for that, I give it five stars.

[Mme Forte · Rating 4 out of 5]

After skimming a few of the reviews of this book on Goodreads, I think I may have read it with a different focus than some other readers. Maybe it's because I'm the mother of a tween daughter who one day (too soon for me, probably!) will begin to think about her future in very concrete terms, and, less theoretically than she does now, about the type of human being and woman she wants to become. The divergence of a mother's and daughter's ideas about these vital topics was the core of the book for me.

I enjoyed the book; it's not super-challenging literature, some of the characters are contrived to the point of stereotype, the setting IS a giant stereotype of Suburbia, and the ending wraps up a little bit too neatly for me...but, as I said, I wasn't reading this for literary analysis. I was reading this for a story that would pull me in and keep me interested for the length of the book. "The Gap Year" managed to do that.

It also disturbed me a bit, and made me think, and made me apply some of the events in the book to my own life. One terribly realistic aspect of the plot shows just how fragile is the membrane that connects a mother to a daughter -- I'm not talking about motherlove, which is unconditional and immutable; I'm talking about the common beliefs, values and experiences that tie a parent and a child together in the real world. Cam, the mother, has one vision of how her daughter's life should play out, and an idea of the type of person her daughter is. Aubrey, the daughter, has totally different ideas of how she wants herself and her future to develop. The conflict between these two vivid images is the pivot on which the story turns. As a mother (and a daughter), I was a bit disturbed by how tenuous our connection to our mothers and daughters can be.

I will surely think of this story as my daughter grows, and I hope I figure things out a little quicker than Cam does in the book. This was, while fictional, a true-to-life cautionary tale.

[Lori Anaple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Things would be so much simpler if these silly teens would just tell their mothers and/or fathers about what is going on in their lives! I get that you want independence, but Come ON! With the serious shit that Tyler is living he would appreciate the fact that Cam would totally dote on him too! But nooooo, the girl is afraid to bring the clanger down on the plan. The mother would just blow a nut. No way could this woman ever understand. I bet she would have. Especially if Aubry would just talk to her. It might not be an easy road, but talk to her. Jesus. Why is this so hard? I get it. I really do. My daughter is 13 and answers more than 4 syllables are rare. But If something that major is happening don't write an entire script and not give the parent a part to make a few revisions.

Overall, I liked it. I didn't knock my socks off, but I did like the 2 person narration. Here is why. I liked it because whatever Cam is obsessing over at the moment, we find out what really happened in that time period.

[Jessica✨ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Daughter:

Mother:

Me:


Good god this is a long book...and the ending was awful.

[Diane Wilkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember picking up THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL one night when I was sick. It held my attention despite my severe intestinal pain and I read it until I was finished. I have read it multiple times and it is in my top five books of all time. I read all of Bird's other published books (ALAMO HOUSE, THE MOMMY CLUB) and as each one came out, I read them all--except THE FLAMENCO ACADEMY, which I just could not get into.

Until HOW PERFECT IS THAT came out, I thought her books were getting progressively worse, but that one was excellent. But I had given up on the idea that Bird would ever write anything that would deeply enchant me again--and then...THE GAP YEAR. I just finished it after reading it as feverishly as I had read THE BOYFRIEND SCHOOL. The story of a single mother raising a daughter, the narrative is written by each in more-or-less alternating chapters. (Sometimes the narrator gets an extra entry or two.)

Mother Cam is a lactation expert who has raised her child selflessly, adoring her and trying to give her the best values as opposed to the priciest clothes. Martin, her husband, left to join a religious cult similar to Scientology, which has made the job of mothering much harder. Aubrey is an incredibly wise and individualistic young adult--her mother's daughter--who seems to have become disenchanted with the idea of going to college (her mother's dream and sacrifice for her). Most important, Aubrey is trying to truly become her own person and not live her life for her mother.

I will not traipse down Spoiler's Lane, but I promise you will get some interesting and wonderful surprises if you decide to journey into THE GAP YEAR for yourself. You will also laugh out loud--a lot. Let me tempt you with a morsel of amusement:

"My mother's celebrity vegetation euphoria makes me crave a cheeseburger, and I go outside where a grill has been set up for sad outcast carnivores like me. I decide that the diversity group I'd organize would be dedicated to bacon..."

I love when a book is funny and wise and insightful, and this one is all three. I hated for the book to end. I want to personally thank Ms. Bird for giving a little hint at the end of the book instead of leaving us hanging in 2010. I felt way too close to the characters to be left hanging.

[Tracie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many things about this book rubbed me the wrong way and I will chalk that up to personal persnicketiness, but I have one major beef: why wouldn't Aubrey let her mother meet her boyfriend? As long as girls have been choosing their own dates, they have been introducing overbearing, annoying, embarrassing parents to guys who understand that this is just part of the ritual - and in this case, that simple introduction would have opened a line of communication that might have prevented all the unhappiness this mom and daughter caused each other. Yes, I know - then there wouldn't have been a story, but I was constantly frustrated by all the conversations that failed to happen in this book.

[Angie Gazdziak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this. Both main characters were fairly intolerable and not fully fleshed out. I did like the alternating timelines, and that the story was told from two perspectives, but ultimately the daughter's story didn't have a lot of motivation other than chasing a boy. The ending is also a little too neat for me, everything wrapped up nice and tidy despite two characters having no experience doing what they're doing and being event moderately successful. It also seemed to come from nowhere, given the build up. You don't know HOW these two characters fell into this work, and despite never traveling outside the US, despite having no experience, despite being two white kids from the US, they wind up with a business selling North African food and being somewhat successful.

What I enjoyed most about Cam is that she was a lactation consultant and seemed like she was really good at her job. That's the most redeeming thing I can say about her.

There are a handful of background characters that are barely one-dimensional. They serve no purpose other than to show how "different" Cam and Aubrey are in this town, and they're not even that different, if at all. The worst offender is a school staff member who turns into a blubbering idiot around an 18-year old HS football hero.

Real rating is about 1.5, saved only b/c of the scenes when Cam is working and isn't awful.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreams. Growing up. Relationships. Food Trucks. Cults. Secrets. Lactation Coaches. Decision-making.

I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed this tale of a mother-daughter relationship, told from both point-of-views. Told in a non-linear fashion, you learn about a mother and daughter trying to deal with their relationship, as well as forming new ones with others. Really well done as even with tension between the characters you really felt for both Aubrey and Cam, no matter what they were doing to each other and how they felt about the conflict. You didn't really side with either, yet you empathized completely with where they were coming from.

At one point, it made me never want to have children due to the conflict, yet by the end it portrayed the good and bad in a balanced manner, making me re-think that.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to get through this one, and it almost ended up in the DNF pile several times along the way. I just didn't like Cam, the mom, at all. She was so clueless. I know that that was an essential part to the story, but it annoyed me. Plus the writing felt like the author was just trying too hard to write something funny / creative / witty / poignant, and it came off as forced and ineffective. I didn't understand the inclusion of all the irrelevant details around her job as a lactation consultant. It was like listening to prepubescent boys talking about boobs.

I did like the shifting points of view between mother and daughter that coincided with the shift in present time vs. past, all leading to the meeting point at the end of the book. And I usually liked Aubrey the daughter, even though she was often a brat.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of this hit very close to home, as I an the mother of a 17 year old band geek, but luckily she's proud of it and so far has not developed a rebellious streak. I could really relate to the second about the bittersweet feeling of our beloved children growing up, and questioning the choices we have made in raising them. Loved it.

[Estelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally reviewed on Rather Be Reading Blog

Once in awhile I am lucky enough to read a book I cannot stop thinking about. I want to send carrier pigeons and take out an ad on TV just to inform people of its pure genius. After reading over 90 books so far this year, The Gap Year easily fits in my Top 5 of 2011.

First, writing style – Bird alternates chapters between Mom (Cam) at present day and daughter (Aubrey) exactly a year before. The imagery is crisp and the sentence structure flows perfectly in its simplicity. (While this book is description heavy — something I normally don’t love, it is engrossing here.)


Second, the mystery of how these two stories will end remains until the very end. It doesn’t seem like the kind of book that would remain predictable for so long but Bird has carefully created these characters and their histories so much that the drive to discover them is always existent.

Mother and daughter relationships are never easy, and to watch Cam obsess over the navigation of her daughter’s life – and for Aubrey to have some major life epiphany during her senior year of high school – is completely intense. From start to finish. As a reader, I could relate to both on many levels and at the same time I was frustrated by their actions.

And regret. Many write it. It can easily fall into the realm of cliché. But both of these women (and the other characters we meet throughout the course of the novel) have their own unique responses to it. That’s what makes The Gap Year so real: Bird is able to take the complexities of this trying year in this particular household and consistently express them in such a down-to-earth manner.

Easily a favorite for life, I’m looking forward to reading more of Bird’s work, as well as urging everyone I pass on the street to pick it up n o w!

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm having trouble rating this book. Three stars seems too low, but four too high. I enjoyed it, the writing was solid, but it didn't blow me away. This story centers around Cam, a lactation consultant and single mother and her daughter, Aubrey. The author allows each character to tell their story by alternating chapters in their own voice. Cam's story is in the present, while Aubrey's story is one year prior. The story centers around Aubrey's senior year of high school and her mom wanting her to leave for college.

I alternated between being furious with Aubrey and completely relating to her. Maybe I can still remember those teen years so clearly, but now I see them through the lens of being a mom. It was hard to just take one side. I did want to smack Cam sometimes for her insistence that college was the only path after high school. There was a time I felt that way, but not anymore. Yet, I also wanted to smack Aubrey and just have her tell her mom what was going on with her. Once Tyler told Aubrey about his past I didn't understand why he couldn't talk some sense into her.

Martin, the dad, and his running off to the cult like Next! was just weird. That part didn't work for me. I also would like another book that centers around Twyla and Dori. Overall, it was a nice light read and I would recommend it to others.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lactation consultant, single mother, and judgmental control freak Cam struggles with her daughter Aubrey’s emotional distance during her last year at home. The story alternates between the beginning of Aubrey’s senior year of high school (2009) and the days just prior to her scheduled departure to college (2010), and between mother’s and daughter’s points of view. Band geek Aubrey has an awkward meeting with football star Tyler, which leads to friendship and then romance. Aubrey lies to her mother about the relationship and tries to keep the two from meeting.

Early on, the mother-daughter dynamic was interesting. Following the reappearance of the husband/dad who deserted the family years earlier to join a trendy cult and the disappearance of Aubrey, a road trip dominates the 2010 portion of the story and any pretense at a cohesive plot falls apart. In a couple of places the editor failed to correct the 2009 date to 2010. It was hard to root for anyone here. Cam was lethargic about taking charge of her life, Aubrey was sneaky and surly, and neither Aubrey’s unexplained off-page maturation nor the ex-husband’s change of heart were convincing. The plot probably rates less than 3 stars, but the book did hold my interest, especially the parts that dealt with Cam’s career.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review for Library Journal:

Traditionally, a gap year is a year taken by a young adult after secondary school and before starting college. However, in Bird’s latest novel, the title alludes to the break in a mother-daughter relationship during the daughter’s senior year of high school. Single mom Camilla feels her daughter, Aubrey, beginning to pull away from her, especially after Aubrey embarks on a romance with classmate Tyler. Add in the sudden reappearance of Aubrey’s father, who years ago left the family to join a cultlike religion (it might sound familiar to fans of certain Hollywood types), and gaps in this family open and close at blinding speed. The narrative alternates between Camilla’s current perspective over the course of a few days and Aubrey’s retelling of the previous year. This technique makes for a compelling read and builds to a satisfying and surprisingly tender conclusion.

VERDICT Not as outrageously comedic or over the top as Bird’s How Perfect Is That, this title is wry and funny, with a more grounded story. Sure to please Bird’s fans and readers struggling with their own mother-daughter issues.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljin...

[L.E. Fidler · Rating 3 out of 5]

i am on the fence with this one.

Bird's novel moves back and forth between Cam (the crazy mother) in the present and Aubrey (the bitch daughter) in the past. We get Cam trying to get her daughter to pick up some trust fund money left to her by her father before he joined a Scientology-esque cult named "Next" (don't worry, assholic, abandoning daddy comes back later on). Aubrey is explaining to us how she met Tyler, who appears to be a cross between every role Brad Pitt has ever played, the star football player who can only really be himself around this awkward band girl who quits band and becomes "popular" (i'm over-simplifying, but the premise is incredibly flimsy, reality-speaking).

The beginning of the book is a bit...forced. Operating in the present tense is very strange, particularly when that present is constantly interrupted by someone else's past. By the end, the only character I actually really liked was Tyler, who gets villainized by the mommy and immortalized by the daughter. To me, he felt the most human.

But then, maybe everyone's got a crush on Ty-Mo. Even me.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Girl HS student Audrey meets a seemingly bad boy, and her mom gets upset in this novel of alternating viewpoints. The mom is a nurse who helps new mothers learn to breast feed. Her best friend Dori is estranged from her daughter Twyla. And the mother, Cam, doesn't talk to her ex husband, who has joined a cult and not spoken to his daughter. The book's perspectives also take place in different time periods. I started reading this and was drawn into it at first, but I was very busy this week so I havent' had a chance to finish it, and I found the last 100 pages were kind of boring. Overall, a quick, fresh but forgettable read.

[Sherry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw this book in a copy of Book Page I picked up at my local library and I was excited to read it. Maybe I set my initial hopes too high.

I thought this book was okay. I kept thinking maybe something more exciting was going to happen, so I kept reading. From my perspective nothing overly exciting does happen. This is definitely more of a slice of life type of book.

The writing itself was pretty good. I could easily picture the characters and their surroundings.

I would probably not recommend this book to my friends.

[rubywednesday · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like this could have great appeal to a very specific subsection of society (wealthy western women with grown children?) but it didn't do much for me. There was too much navel-gazing, too much trying to clever when it wasn't that clever, and nobody learned anything! nobody grew! it was just pointless.

also, i found it impossible to believe anyone would be playing football at that level without knowing their real age.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book. What is interesting to me is how I could identify with the mother (as the parent of a teenage daughter) and yet still have these intense flashbacks of being on the cusp of adulthood and would then find myself identifying with the daughter. There were elements to the story that made me roll my eyes, but the core story kept me interested.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even though, I did finish this book and it got better as the story progressed, I wasn't enthralled with this book.

The mother was way too high strung, the daughter was being a normal teenager but shutting her mother out, and the friend was funny.

I thought the story was going to be about the year between high school and college but it is not.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a decent book, but I feel like it could have and should have been better. Neither main character was particularly likable. The daughter also wasn't particularly well developed as a character. Neither her relationship with her father nor the one with her boyfriend was ever really explained. It seemed like it was conflict, conflict jump to happy ending with no real path there.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timing is everything when a certain book finds you...loved this story !

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious!

[Sariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a mom with a kid that just finished his first year of college and another kid heading into his last couple of years of high school, I really thought this story would resonate a bit more with me. And some parts did (like trying to be a mom that your kid talks to and shares with and is happy to be around, but honestly teenagers al kind of go through that “ugh you’re so embarrassing don’t ever speak in front of me my head hurts from the eye rolling and constant sighing” stage, right? RIGHT??), but overall I just didn’t feel a connection with Cam (the mom). She was just so self involved herself. I get it. Your husband ran off to join a cult and you’re stuck in a suburban nightmare snd you think you’re just too cool for everyone else. Guess what, Cam?? Most people honestly don’t care that you’re a single mom. And people who come in to suburbia all “oh I use to live in this super hip yet crunchy, bohemian neighborhood and was such a cool woman before I moved here to hell” are just setting themselves up to be the outcast that they think they are. And Aubrey (the daughter)… you don’t have to tell your mom EVERYTHING but you don’t have to make it out like she’s destroying your life by asking where you’re going to be. And also, band is cool and you’re lame for all the mean things you said because you decided senior year that you wanted to be a different person. Plenty of people stay in band and have the time of their lives, and it’s *genuine* enjoyment. They don’t throw away years of work, dedication, effort, and talent because a football player said hi.
Overall, I did like the book. It kept me up at night, reading. And I liked the format of telling the two women’s stories from different points in time. I was just frustrated by the characters. And the end wrapped up very neatly. I was a little surprised at how much it built to this huge climax… and then it was resolved in what felt like a couple of sentences.

[Marzipan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started out poorly. I wasn't a fan of the writing; it was overwrought and unnatural. The chapters written from the perspective of the daughter were refreshing when compared to the forced, contrived counterpart of her mother. Detail was given excessive attention but it was all the wrong detail. (Detail is great when it's the right kind.) However, the slightly better Aubrey-POV writing didn't make the ungrateful, annoying teenager's personal bitchiness any easier to bear.

I was most invested and interested in the middle of the book. I got caught up by the whole Martin thing and daddy issues and everything that played out. The alternating perspectives annoyed me at times, especially when they did not coincide. Some writers have a way with these, smoothly transitioning between perspectives without jarring the reader or losing their interest.

Most don't.

The ending was a big fail. Totally unbelievable and a bit too neat. My hunger for the resolution of all the emotional issues in this novel was left largely unaddressed, save for a mail-order fictitious-sounding ending.

Also, the author WAY downplays time. Sixteen years is not sixteen months. Perspectives cannot be expected to remain unchanged in that course of time. Growth is natural and expected, but in this book, the characters seemed one-fold and unchanged from their more-than-a-decade-ago selves.

Overall: nothing lost, nothing gained. Quick read, but no lingering sentiments.

[Alyssa Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect when I picked it up at a library sale, but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed it. The snappy dialogue and descriptions were a treat. The author really spent time describing the world and was super accurate when revealing how certain characters would feel and react to certain situations. It was awesome and made it very believable.

The only thing that brought the score down was the obnoxiously long epilogue basically only talking about nipples and breasts (MC is a lactation consultant, I get it, but... I mean almost 15 pages of describing nipples). I thought the epilogue wasn't even needed. The last chapter ended really well the way it was and didn't need any fluff at the end.

[Loretta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was the story engaging? Yeah, kind of, in the way that you watch a train wreck wondering what the outcome is going to be. Bird is very good at giving little drips of backstory to keep you reading on to figure out what exactly happened. The main problem I have is that these characters are all so UNLIKEABLE. The daughter is an absolute brat, and I say that even though I completely identify with the story of mothers and daughters learning to separate from each other. But guess what? The mother is ALSO a brat. All full of "I am the perfect mother"-ness and even though it's kind of the point that she learns we all make mistakes, I still want to smack her. Possibly it's also how she is just too darn good for those boring suburban mothers. She's a REBEL, y'all.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know how sometimes you read the right book at the right time - this is that book. Just as my girls head off to university, I read this novel about a mother and her daughter, who not only pushes her away, falls in love with the high school football hero, starts communicating with the guy who left them both, but treats her poor mom with a combination of eye-rolling and a total and complete lack of empathy. Wow , makes you appreciate what you have! Even if they are leaving, at least the heartbreak did not happen before they left. An engrossing look at motherhood and a less realistic look at young love, I did enjoy this book.

[Maria Ciminillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a young woman in college who went through a similar phase with her mother not too long ago I enjoyed this honest telling of what a mother daughter relationship can be like. However, I tend to gravitate towards books that lean a little more on the unrealistic side so as much as I appreciated the authenticity I wished there would have been more focus on the general drama going on in the daughter’s life and in her romantic relationship. I also would have liked more scenes of the mother and daughter together although I liked the use of a dual narration style. Overall, it was good but I wasn’t blow away!

[Karen Murnane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was an ok story I could relate to: single mom, kid turns 18, going in a direction you didn't envision or wish for. All turns out ok. Happy ending.

The cons: the whole Aubrey and Tyler story was drawn out almost too long. And the book ended far too neatly. Cam and Martin back together, Aubrey and Tyler are fine and even the wayward Twyla showed up in the end having had a baby. Who she named. Aubrey. Oh puleeze....

Still had to finish because I did genuinely want to see how everything turned out.