Book Description 

Thirty-five-year-old Seattleite Sadie Wells needs an escape. She’s desperate to escape her monotonous routines, the family business that has consumed her entire life, and the unexpected gay panic that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about herself. So when her injured sister offers Sadie her place on a tour along Portugal’s Camino de Santiago, she decides this is the perfect chance to get away from it all.

After three glasses of wine on the plane and some turbulence convince Sadie she won’t even survive the flight, she confesses all her secrets to her seatmate, Mal. The problem: the plane doesn’t crash, and it turns out Mal is on her Camino tour. Worst of all, Sadie learns that she is on a tour specifically for queer women, and that her two-hundred-mile trek will be a journey of self-discovery, whether she wants it to be or not.

Fascinated by the woman who drunkenly came out to her on the plane, Mal offers to help Sadie relive the queer adolescence she missed out on as they walk the Camino. As Sadie develops her newfound confidence, Mal grapples with a complicated loss and unexpected inheritance. But as their relationship blurs the lines between reality and practice, they both must decide if they will forever part at the end of the tour or chart a new course together.

With “funny, poignant” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) prose, Alison Cochrun explores the power of letting go of your past and realizing that it’s never too late to live as your authentic self.

My Review 

Going on the Camino has been one of my bucket list items since I first saw the Rick Steves episode featuring the pilgrimage, so I was very excited about the opportunity to read a Camino romance. 

I liked that both protagonists were older, although neither was past 40, but I suppose mid-to-late 30s is considered older in the genre. However, they both came across as younger than their actual age, especially with the whole “practice” aspect to their situationship. It was refreshing to see the other people on the tour call them out on it and tell them that there was no such thing as practice sex. 

Speaking of which, the secondary characters were simply delightful, although some of them tended to blend together, with the exception of Stefano, a gay man who wasn’t paying attention when he booked the Camino tour and did not realize that the company caters exclusively to sapphic women of all types. I would love to see a Stefano spinoff. 

But on that note, Sadie’s sister didn’t think it was relevant to tell her about the tour company and then there’s some awkwardness at the beginning when Sadie’s sexuality is questioned. 

The descriptions of the tour and the food were lovely and I couldn’t help laughing at the blog posts Sadie wanted to write—much to her sister’s horror— about how much her feet hurt and how tired and smelly she was from walking all day. 

I would recommend Every Step She Takes. This book had a nice balance between sweet moments and serious moments and funny moments. The characters experience a lot of growth over the course of the book which is the point of the Camino.   

I received a digital ARC of this book from Atria/NetGalley.