Overview

""A truly fascinating and heartwarming travelogue that beautifully points us in bold directions.""-Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders One woman's cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead. In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago. As the miles roll by, she wonders: ""Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can't-or shouldn't-happen?"" The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other. Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we're told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

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9781571311825

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Reviews

Praise for All the Wild Hungers “Profound . . . Anyone who has experienced a family member’s struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book . . . In the end, the overriding hunger referred to in this lovely book’s title is the hunger for life . . . Praise, sympathy and thanks to Babine, who has given us this ode, lament and meditation.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Babine exudes a passion that is inseparable from action . . . She is cooking against cancer . . . All the Wild Hungers is composed, in both senses of the word, calm, and put together with care.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Transportive and vivid . . . Babine’s writing brims with tenderness—for her family, her home, and the food she prepares—warming readers’ hearts.” —Publishers Weekly “For the author, food sustains like a lifeline or even a bloodline. . . . [Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances.” —Kirkus “A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making. Karen Babine’s language is the plush dough she kneads, her observations as elastic as gluten bubbles. By the book’s conclusion you will become a child again, standing on a chair to peer into the pot, not wanting the process of making—of cooking, of understanding, of as she says, ‘consuming the knowing’—to ever end.”—Amy Thielen, author of Give a Girl a Knife “In this beautiful and haunting book, Karen Babine leads us into the kitchen and cooks healing meals for her mother and herself. With humor and imagination, she names each of her cast iron pots, reclaimed from thrift stores, and simmers the elements of grief and longing, hope and love, with acceptance, insight, and wisdom.”—Beth Dooley, author of In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland

Praise for The Allure of Elsewhere “What a pleasure to travel with Karen Babine, along highways and logging roads, from campsite to campsite, through time and deep into history. The Allure of Elsewhere showcases a love of geography and genealogy, close family and distant ancestors, fierce independence, solitude, storytelling, and the crafting of a life. Under Babine’s deft attention, places come alive, the dead reanimate, time folds in on itself until centuries feel tangible. ‘It’s all connected,’ she writes, ‘even if we cannot recognize the ways in a particular moment.’ The Allure of Elsewhere shows us how.”—Michele Morano, author of Like Love “The Allure of Elsewhere is a beautiful unraveling of family history through self-exploration. Just as a winding road reveals its secrets one at a time, Karen Babine takes us through the twists and turns of a complex genealogy and her own place within it. She weaves the story of her chosen solo lifestyle with generations prior who lived the opposite while examining how their history lives not just in our memories, but in our bones.”—Heather Anderson, author of Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home Praise for All the Wild Hungers “Profound . . . Anyone who has experienced a family member’s struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book . . . In the end, the overriding hunger referred to in this lovely book’s title is the hunger for life . . . Praise, sympathy and thanks to Babine, who has given us this ode, lament and meditation.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Babine exudes a passion that is inseparable from action . . . She is cooking against cancer . . . All the Wild Hungers is composed, in both senses of the word, calm, and put together with care.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Transportive and vivid . . . Babine’s writing brims with tenderness—for her family, her home, and the food she prepares—warming readers’ hearts.” —Publishers Weekly “For the author, food sustains like a lifeline or even a bloodline. . . . [Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances.” —Kirkus “A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making. Karen Babine’s language is the plush dough she kneads, her observations as elastic as gluten bubbles. By the book’s conclusion you will become a child again, standing on a chair to peer into the pot, not wanting the process of making—of cooking, of understanding, of as she says, ‘consuming the knowing’—to ever end.”—Amy Thielen, author of Give a Girl a Knife “In this beautiful and haunting book, Karen Babine leads us into the kitchen and cooks healing meals for her mother and herself. With humor and imagination, she names each of her cast iron pots, reclaimed from thrift stores, and simmers the elements of grief and longing, hope and love, with acceptance, insight, and wisdom.”—Beth Dooley, author of In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland

Author Information

Karen Babineis the two-time Minnesota Book Awardwinning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life and the editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She is currently an UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of TennesseeChattanooga.

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