You Can’t Get There From Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World by Gayle Forman

Part travel writing and part memoir, You Can’t Get There from Here chronicles freelance writer Gayle Forman’s year-long travels with her husband Nick, and is as much about their relationship, and her attraction to the world’s outsiders, as it is about the places she visits along the way. Eschewing long descriptive passages concerning the geology and geography of the countries she passes through, Forman focuses mainly on one particular group of people in each chapter, attempting to see each place “through the eyes of those on the margins.” Thus, she hosts a party for fakaleiti (a third gender) in Tonga, struggles with how to help and relate to juvenile buskers in Cambodia, camps out with adolescent “Tolkienists” in Kazakhstan, and parties with members of a burgeoning hip-hop scene in Tanzania. What draws her to these groups is a need to explore the sense of belonging subcultures provide for their members, the same balm provided to her by the theater rats, punks, and art geeks she discovered in high school and still identifies herself with. Young adults will be especially drawn to this element of the book.

Forman’s exploration of fringe group identity also serves a very personal purpose, that of understanding her religious heritage and putting her rocky traveling relationship with her husband in perspective. In one of the more interesting chapters of the book, the author spends time with the Lemba of South Africa, a people of Christian-upbringing who only recently have discovered their Jewish roots as one of the “lost tribes of Israel.” Their struggle to deal with media harassment and to relate to more conservative Jewish groups forces Forman to ask some hard questions about her on-again off-again religious beliefs. The only area in which this book somewhat falters is the author’s repeated attempt to put the globalization that marginalizes many of the groups she meets into perspective and see the positive side of its effects, which too often suffers from hopeful generalization and unsubstantiated statements. But Forman’s sympathies are never in doubt when dealing with outsiders, and that’s not what the book is really about, anyhow. By remaining constantly open and honest about her feelings and foibles, she presents an engaging and intimate look at an imperfect but compassionate traveler doing her best to find her place in a physically and emotionally bewildering world, no matter where she happens to be along the journey. Moderate explicit language and sexual situations, drug use. Ages 14 and up.