All the Way to the Tigers

March 1, 2020
Morris chronicles her journey to India, where she sought a tiger and found herself. The author, who has won the Rome Prize in literature and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, has published multiple novels, story collections, and travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing To Declare. At first blush, her latest seems rather thin and underrealized, its time-shifting format a distracting affectation. Soon, however, readers will acknowledge that this approach propels rather than disrupts the narrative flow even if some of Morris' impressionistic asides seem like random thoughts. The author recounts her devastating ankle injury in 2008, arduous recovery, and the 2011 journey to India that took her all the way to the tigers. This last is a mostly uneventful tale, defined by a raging bronchial infection, bitter cold, and long periods of disappointment in the jungle. But Morris uses these longueurs to travel within, pondering the challenging relationship she shared with her parents, youthful self-doubts, old demons, and her not-always-seamless emergence as a writer. These passages arrive with disarming candor. Though the accounts of her travails preparing for and finally traveling in India seem rather ill-humored for a veteran globe-trotter like Morris, the savvy travel writer generally shines through. Her descriptions of the villages and cities on her route are characteristically honest, observant, and striking. Her reports on the nature of the Bengal tiger, as well as conservation efforts to restore its numbers, add to our understanding of the animal and its place in the human imagination. For Morris, the restless child who became a restive traveler, the adventure is always about seizing the moment, impermanence, and escape. "Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child," she writes. "With a child's sense of wonder and surprise. To move as if you've never been somewhere before, even if you've been there a thousand times." Even when Morris is not on her A game, she still manages to convey her passionate longing.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 25, 2020
Determined to move beyond a debilitating injury, novelist Morris (Gateway to the Moon) treks solo across India hoping to come face-to-face with a tiger in this engrossing tale. A hundred-plus short chapters cover Morris’s weekslong tiger safaris through jungles and savannas. Interspersed throughout are scenes of Morris’s ice skating accident, in which she fractured her ankle; moments of uncertainty over her recovery; and nuggets of trivia about tigers. Childhood flashbacks reveal her recurring dream of tigers, her angry but loving father, and her cruelly unsympathetic mother who nonetheless takes the teenage Morris on a whirlwind tour of Europe, sowing the seeds of a lifelong wanderlust. She writes, “Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world... with a child’s sense of wonder and surprise.” This wonder bolsters her through daily tours in an open jeep, a bout of bronchitis, and unheated accommodations during one of India’s coldest winters. Though she eventually encounters a tiger in the wild, an epiphany comes on the trip home when, lost in a Mumbai slum, “strangers who have nothing are showing me the way.” The tiger, it turns out, “was never really the point.... It was always about the journey.” Morris’s descriptions of remote beauty, grinding urban poverty, and exotic adventures will captivate armchair tourists and travel memoir fans.

June 1, 2020
Just five more minutes, Morris declared while ice skating, a fateful phrase she started to imagine engraved on my tombstone. She is a lingerer; her fascination with the world evident in her enrapturing fiction and candid travel writing. In 2008, Morris was giddy with anticipation over a pending sabbatical, but a fall on the ice left her with a shattered ankle and leg. This quick-gliding memoir spins between that year and 2011, when Morris is finally able to travel solo to India on her postponed quest to see a tiger in the wild, having long encountered tigers in her dreams. Morris is frank, funny, and incisive as she revisits her free ranging Chicago childhood, single motherhood, and her start as writer, and expounds on tigers in the world and in the imagination. Her sojourn in India occurs during the coldest winter in memory, and Morris is sick as well as freezing. Yet she waits patiently and attentively in tiger reserves with equally determined drivers and guides. Morris' epigrammatic memoir is a finely wrought mosaic of unexpected and provocative pieces cunningly fit together.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)