Book Review: Restoring Joy
Restoring Joy: 40 Days & 40 Nights on the Camino de Santiago
by Colleen O’Toole
Stone Boat Editions, 2025
295 pages
on Goodreads
Reviewed by Joseph A. Curro, Jr. | Arlington, MA
How often do pilgrims find themselves walking and breaking bread with another, while never quite learning why their fellow sojourner has set out upon the Way?
In Restoring Joy, American pilgrim and Canadian resident Colleen O’Toole takes a big risk. In the very opening pages of the book, she lays out in black and white the life challenges that called her to the Camino. She does so, even though—as she makes clear in her memoir—she was extremely reticent about these innermost struggles and issues and consciously refrained from sharing them with others in the first days of her pilgrimage. (To avoid spoilers, readers will have to discover these secrets themselves.)
O’Toole is nursing both a “mortal wound,” which she refers to as “ambiguous loss” and “disenfranchised grief,” and a mysterious foot injury, which had stumped all manner of specialists. By “reading us in” to her motivations and fears early on, we are better able to experience the Camino through O’Toole’s eyes.
This is a deeply spiritual book. It is punctuated throughout with observations and epigraphs from a wide array of faith and wisdom traditions, including large helpings of Buddhist teachings. The author, who was raised Catholic but drifted away from belief and practice, nevertheless approaches the religious sites, icons, and rituals of the Camino with the utmost respect. (That is, when she doesn’t miss them… In one particularly hilarious account, O’Toole rushes past the opportunities to hug the Apostle and venerate the relics of St. James, thinking she is in a long line for the Cathedral museum, and not realizing she is in the sanctuary itself.)
Humor abounds in this book, with novel takes on albergue snoring outbursts, several vignettes involving brightly colored underwear, and happy memories of a dear friend who is lost to life, but who appears to O’Toole in spirit as she approaches the Ermita de San Nicolás.
Restoring Joy employs a travelogue of the author’s Camino pilgrimage as a central spine that supports and moves the narrative forward. The book is peppered with plenty of background information, including a handy glossary as part of the front matter. As with any good Camino tale, there are friendships made, fleeting acquaintances lost, and more than a few coincidences that might lead one to believe in Camino magic.
This book itself is magical, hopeful, uplifting, and well worth the read.
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