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    Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk
    Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk
    Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk
    Audiobook10 hours

    Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk

    Written by Cameron Powell

    Narrated by Cameron Powell

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What would you do if, on the day your marriage ended, not long after the Recession put you out of work, your only parent called to tell you her deadly cancer was back?

    Cameron Powell paused the collapse of his life and career to join his mother on a meaning-seeking romp across Spain – one sure to delight fans of Eat, Pray, Love, Bill Bryson, and Wild. This book’s collection of their travel-writing dispatches about the legendary Camino de Santiago, with a politically incorrect Spaniard, a theatrical Frenchwoman, and a 15-year-old “shirt-tail relative” is a hilarious hero’s journey of the first order. 

    For three more years Cameron and his mother fought for her well-being, and when the bell finally tolled for her, and it was time to walk with her one last time, he wasn’t ready. What he didn’t expect was how the ordinary magic of love and meaning would armor them both against fear and despair.

    As his mother lays dying, Powell writes, in real-time, and in the inimitable voice of a man seized by emotion, one of literature’s great love letters, sharing with us their “beautiful and excruciating last camino”, guiding us through the big questions and giving you-are-there breath to the work of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal -- while serving as an indispensable guide on how to die, and be there for dying others, not just well but meaningfully. 

    By turns lyrical and meditative, ironic and compassionate, this deeply-felt memoir takes us, with wisdom, humor, and an overflowing tenderness, into one of the most challenging journeys true friends can ever take together, and opens up new insight into what it means to be a man. 

    If you want see how you can show up for yourself and others, and create a life that lets you live with purpose and die with meaning, Ordinary Magic is for you. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCameron Powell
    Release dateNov 29, 2019
    ISBN9781094241821
    Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk

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    Reviews for Ordinary Magic

    4.5/5

    11 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the first half, more detail than I as the reader required in book two.
    • 5/5
      A powerful, beautiful, happy sad story. I was looking for accounts of El Camino de Santiago, and this book delivered that and much more. Thank you.
    • 3/5
      I picked this book because unthought it was mainly about waking the Camino but it is really a story of a son’s love for his mother, especially going through a tough childhood and the ravages of cancer. Fair enough; I lived through a similar experience with my Dad.

      But he goes into such detail about virtually everything his mother said and did, particularly the slow decline of her health, that it was way too much information; his mother sounds like a great lady, but I just wanted the story to be over.
    • 5/5
      Not my normal choice of book but absolutely brilliant and helped me to understand myself and people around me
    • 5/5
      The narrator brought the story to life by singing and using different accents
    • 5/5
      Such an awesome book! Made me cry many times as I can relate to my own mother’s illness. Thank you!
    • 5/5
      This book pulled me in with its raw writing realness and emotion laden pages of expression.
      Thank you for sharing this deeply intimate journey, it’s prompted me to love more and share that love with others along the way. Buen Camino