{ "item_title" : "Ring of Salt", "item_author" : [" Betsy Cornwell "], "item_description" : "Extraordinarily moving, exquisitely written, and socially revolutionary. --The Irish Times Ring of Salt is so vast and tender and urgent, it's almost like reading a novel. I couldn't put it down. I haven't cheered for a heroine like Betsy in ages. --Jen Hatmaker, author of Awake For readers of Maggie Smith and Stephanie Land, an inspiring and lyrical memoir about a writer and mother who flees an abusive marriage and must learn to reclaim the story of her life through a search for home on Ireland's wild, western coast. At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland for a fresh start. Leaving behind a painful past, she chases her dream of becoming a novelist to the misty shores of the Aran Islands. There she meets a handsome and charming horse trainer, and her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when they elope to Gretna Green. Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare. Betsy is trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son's first birthday, she must flee home again, this time turning to the women around her--her local survivor support group, a trusted family friend, and an online Smith College alumnae network--for help she'd never known she could ask for. After a brush with homelessness, she struggles to scrape together a living for herself and her son. On sleepless nights, she scrolls through real estate listings that might as well be castles in the air, and starts to foster an impossible dream: What if she could use her writing to buy a home, one that no one could take away from her and her baby? One that might become a haven, not just for her family, but other single parent artists and writers, too? When she discovers a historic knitting factory and former cinema on Ireland's rugged Connemara coastline, left empty and crumbling for years, that precarious dream becomes her lifeline. Over the next two years she works to crowdfund the old knitting factory's purchase by sharing its story and her own, in candid posts that range from the unexpectedly steep learning curves she encounters with home renovations and internet dating, to her heartbreaking fight to keep custody of her son, with her growing online community. But as the deadline to buy nears, she realizes she will have to reckon with everything she believes about family, survival, and what happily-ever-after truly means for her dream to have any chance of coming true. Ring of Salt combines a powerful and relatable narrative of survivorship and healing with lush writing about the windswept landscapes and rich mythology of rural Ireland to craft a real-world fairy tale about the ordinary, but no less life-changing, forms of magic we can all access: vulnerability, community, and the power of telling your own story.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/66/804/529/166804529X_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.00", "online_price" : "29.00", "our_price" : "29.00", "club_price" : "29.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "29.00" } }

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At 24, American Betsy Cornwell had come to Ireland’s Aran Islands for a summer to work on her first novel and to leave behind some difficult family issues. The stark beauty of the islands, along with her day job at a travel hostel, charmed her: “I arrived on Inis Mor in selkie weather: the ocean, sky and shoreline all shone silver with the gentle mist the Irish call ‘a grand soft day.’ ” Her summer turned even more magical when she met Tommy, a horse trainer from nearby Galway. Betsy and Tommy were soon serious, and Betsy fell hard for the handsome older man. After a whirlwind courtship, the two pledged their undying love and married. But the fairy tale life soon curdled: Tommy showed himself to be short-tempered, untrustworthy and emotionally and physically abusive. Still, it took five years before Betsy could see the abuse for what it was and work up the courage to leave with the couple’s infant son, Robin. After she fled, Tommy stalked her, declaring that he’d get her deported and separate her permanently from their son. With no paternity support and only her intermittent income from writing and teaching, Betsy struggled to keep herself and Robin housed. She was unable to leave Ireland because of Tommy’s claim on baby Robin, but she was herself undocumented and unsure if Ireland would allow her to stay. Despite this bleak situation, Ring of Salt: A Memoir of Finding Home and Hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland is full of promise and resilience, recounting Betsy’s journey from being nearly homeless and friendless to working toward a new dream: the creation of a writing residency in a historic knitting factory for writer-mothers like herself. She finds friendship and community in a private message board for Smith College alums and the support group she attends with other women who have survived domestic abuse. She longs to build a refuge where women like herself might “have dreams that are not about survival.” Cornwell, the author of YA fantasy novels The Forest Queen and Mechanica, among others, writes with a poet’s eye about the Irish landscape, the sea and her little garden, seamlessly weaving in bits of Irish folklore, history and fairy tales as she processes her abuse and learns to dream again. “I take my life in my hands,” Cornwell writes. “I feel for the holes, I find them, and I mend them where I can.” Ring of Salt makes the reader feel the pull of rural Ireland and root for Cornwell’s unlikely project to come to fruition.