When I first started reading A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume, I smiled grimly. Like the novel’s protagonist, Frankie, and indeed like the author herself, I too take pictures of dead little creatures. We are never as unique or exceptional as we think we are, a fact that Frankie–an aspiring and, in her mind, failed artist–is keenly, excruciatingly grappling with in this compelling and complex second novel by Baume.

Most readings have, understandably, focused on the various forms of human suffering explored in the novel. Following a nervous breakdown, 26-year old Frankie packs her things and leaves Dublin, moving initially into her childhood home with her parents, and then into her deceased grandmother’s cottage where she grapples with that bereavement as well as the loss of her own artistic life and sense of self. In this longer review, I look at the novel from another angle: the nonhuman characters in the novel. For all its layers of grief, death and existential anguish, almost every page of A Line Made By Walking is absolutely teeming with life: specifically, animal life. Frankie may be devoid of human company, but she is surrounded by living, breathing beings who, along with herself, are struggling with the precarity of life and ever-present death.

https://deborahrosereeves.com/2019/06/27/book-review-a-line-made-by-walking-by-sara-baume/