Review from Keith Taylor

In this wonderfully moving book, Anne Marie Oomen, one of our finest regional essayists, goes looking for a larger map. She hits the road in the true American spirit, although this traveler is a midwestern woman, comfortable with her age and uncertainties. She turns the passion and precision of her prose on places as different as the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Santa Monica pier, as the coral reefs off Puerto Rico and the alvar plains on Drummond Island. As she must, she returns to northwestern Michigan, the home ground of her imagination, with a generous vision that allows all of us to share in the fragile but precious knowledge she has acquired on her journey.

— Keith Taylor, author of If the World Becomes So Bright