1000 Steps (2025)
W. Newton Reid
Pub: W. Newton Reid
Poetry-Novel
Paperback, 163 pages
ISBN 978 0 473 75662
8
I’ll admit I felt
trepidation at the prospect of reviewing this book. 1000 Steps is a
novel written in short poems. It follows teenaged Amy’s thoughts and memories
as she climbs the thousand steps of the title. She recalls her troubled
childhood and dysfunctional family. She worries about her little brother Sean.
‘I want to protect him
from bad things.
Amy, it gradually emerges,
has been sexually abused by people she should have been able to trust. She
looks back on her life and feels pain.
‘I wish my thoughts
would shut up.’
Empathy is the key to this book’s success. Readers are swiftly drawn into Amy’s thoughts and share her feelings of powerlessness and grief. Reading W. Newton Reid’s beautifully simple poetry, we become one with Amy, as she overcomes tiredness and despair to achieve her goal.
‘I’ll focus on the
steps,\
and nothing else.\ I can control that.’
Amy finds another
sanctuary as she achieves the goal of her climb. The thousand steps have taken
her to the ironically-named Lovers Leap, where she rejects the idea of suicide
and instead lets a tiny wildflower - ‘determined, resilient, beautiful’
- inspire her.
‘You can be like that
flower.’
Amy is given help on her
climb after she has an accident and becomes aware that people can be caring and
kind. With her thousand steps achieved,
Amy’s journey has a positive ending, where she meets comfort and hope, kindness
and acceptance.
By
the end, I felt that 1000 Steps is a book which has a great deal to
offer. I can see how teachers, librarians and counsellors might wish to put it
into the hands of troubled teens. It is
compulsively readable. Each poem calls for the next to be read and so we are
journeying with Amy.
