Part travelogue, part exploration—a road trip into the reality behind the cultural myth that is America.
Breakfast at the Exit Cafe begins as a personal story—told in alternating voices by two veteran writer/travellers—of a road trip from British Columbia around the southern rim of the United States, back to their home in southeastern Ontario. It soon becomes a journey of discovery. For Wayne, who was born across the river from Detroit, Michigan, and whose forebears were slaves who came to Canada in the 1870s, it was a journey into fear — the fear of racism, of violence — and into his own family roots in the American Deep South. For Merilyn, who grew up a lonely Canadian in the American School of Campinas, Brazil, it was a journey into the ex-pat promised land, the nation of the American Dream.
Simonds and Grady travel backwards through history, from California, the last frontier of American westward expansion, to the earliest founding settlements of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Roanoke, North Carolina. In pondering the natural splendours of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the Mississippi, the bayous of Louisiana, and the Outer Banks, they consider the impact of physical geography on culture and of culture on the landscape. The Americans they meet along the way—eating in restaurants, manning motel offices, waiting in line for the Martin Luther King Day parade—illuminate a country dissolving in the grip of the final years of the Bush administration, and inspire them to reassess their—and our—assumptions about that powerful and complicated country.
As serendipitous as the trip itself, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe is told with wit and acuity and frequent side trips into fascinating nooks of history, geography, literature. Part travelogue, part exploration, part mid-winter love story, this is a journey into the heart of the next-door neighbour we thought we knew.
Published by Greystone Books, a leading Canadian publisher of books about nature and the environment, popular culture, travel, and current issues.
www.dmpibooks.com/book/breakfast-at-the-exit-cafe
Buy Breakfast at the Exit Cafe at your local independent bookseller.
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Read the Reviews!
—A smart, funny, insightful couple tours the American horizon. Madonna Hamel, Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 22, 2010.
—A travel book that travels well. Winnipeg Free Press
—If one is to travel well, one wants good travel companions. Travellers who arrive with their eyes and hearts open, acute observers with the skill to separate the steak from the sizzle. Virgils with wit. A Bill Bryson or a Redmond O’Hanlon. Grady and Simonds share a sense of humour with these others and the ability to realize (and bare) their own foibles and failings. Mark Frutkin in Literary Review of Canada, December, 2010. Read the full review (PDF) »
Read the Articles!
“Two for the Road” in Open Book Ontario magazine
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/magazine/fall_2010/articles/two_road
Two Canadian authors chronicle their road trip across the United States, on a journey of discovery and understanding
