A Year on Route 30: One Mom’s Collection of Essays is Carrie Bradshaw as a single mom and former inner-city school teacher.

“What does it mean to start over? Does it mean a clean break from a past that has broken your heart? Or does it mean accepting – even embracing – the heartache as an important part of who you are and who you are to become?

These questions are at the center of this collection of essays by Suzanna Parpos. You don't have to be a thirty-something divorced mother to find a little something of yourself in the short pieces that make up this work and give eloquence to small pleasures, to lingering disappointments and to an unblinking self honesty.

Whether she is writing about a childhood trip to the Midwest to celebrate her grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary, reflecting on the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or recalling the lonely December evening that marked the end of her marriage, Parpos's prose is unsparing but never maudlin.

In "Moving Day," when she speaks of "the bitter wind that blew that late December  afternoon" and standing by herself in front of the large POD moving container in the driveway with "the locked door that separated me from the life that had, for months, remained in storage," there is both loneliness and peace, vulnerability and strength.

This is what we discover in those difficult moments – if we face them squarely, without blinking – a comfort in accepting the unknown and a power in baring disappointment.

I think readers of "A Year on Route 30" will find that with that type of honesty comes a humor, humbleness and uplift that make for an enjoyable read.

As the title suggests, when it comes to happiness, it is how we travel there that matters most.”

– Phil Maddocks, editor, Framingham TAB