Customer Reviews

D'Amour Road

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All based on a true story in Ottowa, Canada. The author shares some of her most precious moments with the reader. You can immediately connect and share her encounters in life. Dejavu for most of us that have lost a loved one. Good reading!

D'Amour Road is the story of two women in Ontario who are turning 40. One of them goes missing, and the other joins a massive search to find her best friend in conjunction with the police, her colorful women's collective, and a younger man whom she finds especially captivating.

Loosely based on the Louise Ellis true story, D'Amour Road, by Sigrid Macdonald, takes us into the life of a woman struggling with middle age. This rite of passage is dotted with travails that take the main character, Tara, into a new phase in her life. After the disappearance of her best friend, she begins a search. Her desperation to find her friend plays out in the myriad of personal experiences in this more mature coming-of-age story.

Ms. Macdonald weaves a first-person portrayal of this touching narrative into an emotional and poignant lesson of life and love as only true friends understand it. Women will relate to the many twists and turns our protagonist must endure. Men will gain insight into the psyche of a woman as few are allowed to see it. All will be touched and moved by the endearing depth of emotion and risks a person is willing to endure in order to find a lost friend.

D'Amour Road lives up to its title as it takes you on a Road of Love.

Gigi Miner
Author of "Card Shark"
Writer & Motivational Speaker
[...]

The Review Diaries
D'Amour Road by Sigrid Macdonald
She Unlimited Magazine

Review by
Veronica Marie Kettler


A Powerful book Based on a true story, taking place in Ottawa Canada. Sigrid Macdonald vividly makes us aware of this growing and ignored epidemic. Missing Persons is an epidemic ignored by many, and as this story unfolds, it is amazing how our eyes are open wide shut.

The title of the book is a masterful description which clearly depicts the pages ahead. Based on a true story, it is an astounding book on women's passage in society based in modern Ottawa. One women's life, but many are still missing. I closed the last flap of the book feeling empathy, and compassion for those unfound and the painful footprints left in those still looking.

The characters are real and the story is profound. It is original with a roller coaster ride that explores the reality of a social problem everywhere. Macdonald establishes D'Amour Road, the road of love, also a road to tragedy and unsaid mystery as the search begins for Lisa.

Based on a true story, Sigrid Macdonald has woven a well-paced sensitive story about physical abuse and missing persons. In the process, she describes life in contemporary Ottawa with a focus on aspects of the women's movement. This is an insightful book that readers will think about long after the reading is finished.

What crosses a woman's mind in times of crisis? How many of those crises are self-generated? Sigrid Macdonald asks both these questions as she presents us the life of Tara Richards. Richards is approaching forty, that terrifying watershed in our society. The age where re-examination of one's past life and consideration of the future looms large - too large for some. Instead of remaining in her settled, comfortable life with a professional husband and a teen-age son, the identity issue is complicated by Alain, the handsome, beguiling 24-year-old meat department clerk at the local grocery. Tara wants an affair with him.

Affairs aren't Tara's style. That kind of life has been the way of her friend Lisa Campana. Tara and Lisa have a long-standing friendship. Their mutually buttressing relationship works well. They confide intimate secrets, resolve issues dealing with relationships and offer needed counsel. They've avoided being judgemental with each other, unusual given the disparity of their lifestyles. Tara's mundane lifestyle is exacerbated by her less than stunning figure. For Tara, every day is a "bad hair day". Lisa's attractive figure and independent attitude has enticed her into many relationships. The open lifestyle has also led her to drugs and alcohol. With Tara's help, she's put that behind her, taken up with a new man and seems to have settled down. In a post-movie exchange at Nate's Deli, however, Lisa confesses she's pregnant. She doesn't know who the father is. Filled with foreboding, Tara goes home to her family. Will she ever see her again?

Macdonald has provided us with a new view of my Ottawa neighbours. She places the story firmly in this locale, even to the point of street address numbers. We can feel some familiarity with her descriptions of shops, theatres, traffic, and, of course, the vagaries of Ottawa's weather. Boosting the city is not the point of this book, however. Tara and Lisa's relationship, and their individual behaviours are the primary focus. That focus is intense and explicit. Tara's obsession with Alain, many years her junior, brings the challenge of how she can pursue and consummate it. Her feelings for her husband Mark have seriously dwindled. At times, she even wonders if it was ever really there. As a therapist at Ottawa Central Hospital, an aged building in constant need of repair, Tara faces many patient crises. Although with reluctance, she has even allowed them to contact her at home. Relaxation isn't a major factor in her life. Lisa's disappearance becomes the driving force in her life, to the point where nearly all her dealings with others, from her family to the lurking affair with Alain becomes almost subordinate to it. The discovery of Lisa's car on D'Amour Road a week after she vanished, compounds Tara's worry. Has Lisa met with foul play?

Told in the first-person, the story presents a woman gravely torn with conflicting aims and hampered means of dealing with them. For Tara, support rested on one individual, and Lisa's disappearance removed the one reliable prop. In contrast, Tara takes us to a Women Against Rape [WAR] meeting. Macdonald parades all the stereotypes so often found there. There's the inveterate man-basher, the Tarot-card enthusiast and the woman obsessed with food purity issues. It's a motley crew, and while Tara wants their support in the search for Lisa, she's not swept up in the rhetoric of the militant feminist movement. She virtually commandeers the group to volunteer for the search for the missing Lisa. They baulk at first; Lisa's live-in boyfriend has a record of woman-bashing. We are caught up with Tara's struggle to reconcile her views with the other women and the need to find her friend. Her confusion about how to deal with her declining marriage and the liaison with Alain is only compounded by the meeting. She doesn't want to hurt Mark unduly and she worries about their son's reaction if separation occurs.

In short, Macdonald has produced a powerful story of women's issues. Tara has the virtue of trying to confront them all head-on. For all her protestations of failure and being unattractive, she exhibits strengths that many would be challenged to match in similar circumstances. It's easy to fault her obsession with the younger man - our society doesn't condone "cradle-robbing". Tara's feelings for Alain, while misdirected, aren't contrived. They are very real for her. Someone living in less critical circumstances, having to deal with the challenges of hospital patients, for example, might be able to control her amorous urges. The resolution of Lisa's disappearance and Tara's unfulfilled lusts don't make easy reading, but there is nothing false or fabricated here. If this view needs confirmation, Macdonald's Epilogue provides the justification. It is the capstone of this story. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

I just finished reading Sigrid MacDonald's book,D'Amour Road. It is a very topical book dealing with issues surrounding missing people. Sigrid manages to tell a story about a woman whose friend goes missing and the frantic searh to find her while delving into the lives of the people concerned. Her characters are real and the story multi-layered. Despite the tragic event and its consequences, life goes on.

D'Amour Road by Sigrid MacDonald
From the beginning of D'Amour Road, Sigrid Macdonald defines female friendships as she set the tone for the type of relationship that Tara (the main character) and her friend shared. I actually felt as if I were with them as they were eating at Nate's Diner. Another element that stands out is the humor. MacDonald's way of making me almost topple off my chair every so often provides periodic breaks from the heaviness of the serious matter in the novel. What I also found refreshing was the sparse use of profanity, which, in my opinion, makes a book easier to read.
I found it intriguing how Tara's thought process was so realistic that I could sense her emotions. It was as if I were going through her troubles myself. I believe that every woman who has read this book has, in one time in her life, felt Tara's insecurities, the boredom with her mate, how her hair is never right, her attitude about food and the way she feels about her body. Macdonald intertwines these everyday thought processes within the main character so well that it puts the reader in tune with what Tara is feeling.
As Tara anticipated the possibility of never seeing her missing friend again, MacDonald wrote with such intensity that she compelled me to cherish the female friendships in my life. At the same time, my curiosity was held as I wondered if they would ever find her friend. Another question that kept me riveted was if Tara would fight for her marriage or give in to the infatuation for a man for whom she held a growing fascination.
D'Amour Road touches on deep and insightful subjects that will make you want to put down the book for a minute, call someone, and ask, "What do you think about this particular issue?" Because one of D'Amour Road's themes taps into the innermost feelings that many women experience, I feel that this novel will make you want to get together with your girlfriends and open up your soul. D'Amour Road would be an excellent choice for a book club who has brought out the coffee, snacks, and has allotted enough time for the many in depth discussions that this novel evokes.

"Such a sad but vital story about a very real problem in our society whether it is in the US or Canada or anywhere else in this world. When I am moved to tears, as I was in chapter 16 , I REALLY FELT THAT THIS BOOK IS INDEED POWERFUL, Thanks, Sig."
INGRID N. STRUTHERS

In an auspicious debut novel, D'Amour Road, Sigrid Macdonald draws the reader into the free-flowing associative thinking of Tara Roberts, whose mid-life crisis is punctuated by a desperate search for her best friend, Lisa, her life sponsor, the one to whom she turns when she trips over life. Lisa's disappearance drives Tara headlong into the complex psychological and social dilemmas that define her mid-life crisis.

With stunning originality, Macdonald thrusts readers into a non-stop ride that explores both the mundane and the soul-stirring themes that color the human landscape. In a well-conceived metaphor, Macdonald establishes D'Amour Road, the road of love, where Lisa's car is abandoned as the focal point for the search for Lisa as well as the psychological search for Tara. Beginning with doubts about everything, Tara's search ends in certainties that are rooted in love and trust in herself - certainties that transform the old age of her youth into the youth of her old age.

Review by Dannye Williamsen, co-author of IT'S YOUR MOVE! Transform Your Dreams from Wishful Thinking to Reality.