Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
by Kim Sunée
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kim SunéeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0446697907
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Book Reviews of Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
Book Review: Wonderful for foodies, for travel bugs, for the empathetic reader
Summary: 5 Stars
First, the obvious: if you are a foodie or a traveler, you will love this book.
Sunee's rich descriptions of fresh, seasonal ingredients and the places they came from made me pause during the book to try some of the recipes. Every recipe I prepared was one I would want to make again: Whispery Eggs with Crabmeat, Almond Saffron Cake, Penne with Popped Tomatoes, Couscous Orange Salad, Wild Peaches Poached in Lillet Blanc, Spaghetti with Pancetta and Cream, and the Blueberry Soup which I used in Kir Royales. Tasting these dishes gave me an instant connection to the part of the book in which they appeared, as though I was able to join the scene. Each recipe at the end of a chapter was a reward to be happily anticipated.
Sunee gives a dual meaning to the phrase "comfort food." Some of the dishes fall under the rubric of classic comfort food, but all of them were cooked and served to comfort Sunee and those who dined. Sunee reminded me that kitchen memories are vitally important to the fabric of a family.
For the general reader, there is much to recommend this book. Both Sunee and Elizabeth Gilbert (in Eat, Pray, Love) have tapped into an apparent zeitgeist of today's younger women: "he'll never realize that the everything he wants to give me will never take away the nothing that I've always had." This sentence haunted me.
Gilbert gives us a quick snapshot of the cushy life she walked away from, but Sunee gives us the details we need to understand that it takes guts to reject an easy, privileged life. Shallow women would have stayed for the money, let's be honest. Many women of my (older)generation did just that - at the cost of many valuable years of their lives. After the kids left for college, we gasped and realized we were invested in unfulfilling relationships. It's so much smarter of this younger generation to seek a meaningful life from the get-go. Somehow Sunee knew what it took years for others of us to learn: that things will not make you happy.
This book also has much to say about families and adoption. I empathize with Sunee and her struggle to belong.
Haven't we all felt like failures when our families fall short of the Ozzie and Harriet model? I did have a sense that Sunee held back some of the sensitive details regarding her relationship with her mother, but I respect that. In this age of tell-all bios, it was nice to have a little bit left to the imagination.
This book does not deliver a neat ending tied up with a bow - nor should it. Sunee leaves us with a tangible longing for resolution which is a natural lead-in to a second book. Life isn't like tv - neat solutions in an hour.
Her yearning became mine - the mark of a skillful author with poetic tendencies.
I hated to see Trail of Crumbs end. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have given it as a gift many times. Great read, which left me with a lot to reflect upon, and delicious recipes to boot!!
Summary of Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
Already hailed as "brave, emotional, and gorgeously written" by Frances Mayes and "like a piece of dark chocolate--bittersweet, satisfying, and finished all too soon" by Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, this is a unique memoir about the search for identity through love, hunger, and food.Jim Harrison says, "TRAIL OF CRUMBS reminds me of what heavily costumed and concealed waifs we all are. Kim Sunée tells us so much about the French that I never learned in 25 trips to
When Kim Sunée was three years old, her mother took her to a marketplace, deposited her on a bench with a fistful of food, and promised she'd be right back. Three days later a policeman took the little girl, clutching what was now only a fistful of crumbs, to a police station and told her that she'd been abandoned by her mother.
Fast-forward almost 20 years and Kim's life is unrecognizable. Adopted by a young
Kim takes readers on a lyrical journey from
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