Questing France: Deepening the Search for My Holy Grail

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher and an event coordinator, with a
background in linguistics and education in Okanagan, B.C.

Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem is an Ontario-based relationship counsellor.
In her previous book, Questing Marilyn: In Search of My Holy Grail,
Personal Growth Through Travel (2003), she chronicled her responses to
life-changing events in the hopes that her readers would be encouraged
to make positive changes in their own lives. In Questing France, she
documents another life-altering event: her discovery of her husband’s
infidelity and how she coped with the news.

Belleghem’s use of the present tense throughout the book is
distracting, at times injecting a note of impending doom into the
innocuous details of her daily life. The travels she describes,
including a trip to France with her husband, do not appear to be
connected in a meaningful way to any personal growth she may have
experienced.

As a diary of marital infidelity, insecurity, and vulnerability,
Questing France may prove therapeutic for those readers who have had the
misfortune of finding themselves in the author’s position. For the
rest of us, the book has little to offer.