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North of Ithaka
North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family's Extraordinary Past | Eleni N. Gage
4 posts | 2 read | 2 to read
Leaving behind a sparkling social life and a successful journalism career, Eleni Gage moved from New York City to the remote Greek village of Lia. Lia is the same village where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, and which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous twenty years ago with his international bestseller Eleni. Her four aunts (the diminutive but formidable thitsas) warned Eleni that she'd get killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves if she moved to Lia, invoking the curse her grandmother placed on any of her descendants who returned to Greece. But Eleni was determined to rebuild the ruins of her grandparents' house and to come to terms with her family's tragic history. Along the way, she learned to dodge bad omens and to battle the scorpions on her pillow and the shadows in her heart. She also came to understand that Greece and its memories were not only dark and death-filled, and that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present. Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home.
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review
readingjedi
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Mehso-so

Given how much I love Greece I thought I'd enjoy this a lot more than I did. There is something rather lacklustre about the writing and I actually struggled to get through a few sections that were downright dull. There's a lot of navel gazing by the author & I admit to being rather cynical about her reasons for wanting to restore a house that held so many painful memories for her family & others. There was a book in it, I guess.

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readingjedi
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Started this one last night. We haven't visited Greece since 2019 and won't be till 2023 and I really miss it. Don't know if reading about it is helping or is a kind of very mild torture!

60 likes1 stack add
review
Miss_Kim
Pickpick

Finished this early this morning for one of my #25inFive books. It was great because my Kindle told me it would take me 5 hours and it was just about spot on! This was a particularly nice book for me since I have lived so close to the place where the book is set and I‘ve visited some of the villages. It made me feel ‘homesick ‘ for an area that‘s not even my home.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Andrew65 👏👏👏 (edited) 6y
Miss_Kim This also was my April #ReadAroundtheWorld book for Greece! 📖😁 6y
63 likes2 comments
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jenniferw88
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mellisarock 💙💙💙💙 7y
81 likes1 comment