This book provides with this questions and a lot more about the decisions we have to make in life and the position we state our own feelings and needs. This book encouraged for reflexion about what is the right thing to do: should we do what felt right to us and for us, not considering what we are doing to others? Or should we in the contrary balance our own wishes with the wishes of the ones we love and belong to? Do we have in fact the duty to care for someone we have sweared to, like husband or children or are we free to do whatever we like? What is the aim in life of everyone and who is it to be reached? Happiness? Care for other people? Being a good mother and wife? Should we disguise ourselves to make others happy, should we give ourselves up? Or is it ourself who is the most important, should it be the most important thing in life?

Abra had a very bad depression and the hut was her kind of cure, she felt peace there and so decided to stay and leave her family, without any further explanation, just a little note. Gaining Ground is the readable story of women, who left her family because she didn't feel right in the midst of them. Abra, who hadn't thought about her husband or two children for the last nine years, slowly remembers why she left and what she felt about this little place in the middle of nowhere, why she decided to live here all alone. Although Abra is very unfriendly and harsh to her, Katie decides to stay and learn mor about her mother and why she left them. Her daughter Katie just appeared in her garden at her hut in the wilderness, but Abra first didn't remember to have children and then, when she remembers, did not beliee that Katie is her daughter, because she remembers her daughter, because Abra left her family nine years ago. That's what happened to Abra, the protagonist of this unusual book. You, in the contrary, didn't even remeber to have any children. Imagine yourself sitting in your garden, digging in the earth when suddenly a young woman you never have seen appears in the middle of nowhere, cause that's where you live, and says, that she is your daughter.

Gaining ground joan barfoot