Angels & Aliens

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Going to California Mary Morris has earned a deservedly large following, especially among women readers. She has six novels to her credit, but it's her travel-oriented nonfiction books for which she is best known. Those books, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (which, by the way, has a particularly good section about her stay in Miguel de Allende in Mexico) and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail, crystallized for many readers a uniquely feminine take on the experience of travel. Morris describes the reactions and attitudes she encountered on her wanderings. But — and it's this that makes the books special — she also writes about travel, with all of its stresses and revelations, as a prism through which a modern woman can discover herself. She's been away from home again, this time leaving New York for southern California, and she's chronicled the experience in Angels and Aliens: A California Journey. This business of going west — quite apart from the story of our nation's westward expansion — and settling in the sunny SoCal region, as the TV weather mavens there like to call it, is a remarkably common American experience. I know. I once did it myself. (I deny responsibility for the old joke that the country was once tilted and everything that was loose rolled into California.) Have you ever landed at Orange County's John Wayne International Airport? Mary Morris did and was greeted appropriately, in this icon-rich land, by its gigantic statue of the actor, looking pleasant enough but packingasix-shooter. Within minutes of landing, and in the shadow of John Wayne, she is thinking: "I've made the mistake of my life." This, too, is a remarkably common American experience. For one thing, Morris is hauling more than a typewriter and luggage. She is carrying her ten-month-old daughter, Kate. Back in New York, on the other side of the continent, is the life she knew before and also Kate's father. He was going to be here, too, but it seems he didn't take the professorship after all and they've separated. And now she's here, locked into a university teaching job created for her in the hopes of getting him, alone, and starting over. Now some readers will argue that, if you have to start over in adverse circumstances, you might as well do so in a house in Laguna Beach with a patio that offers a view of the Pacific Ocean. And that may well be so, but of course you still have your battered luggage in the closet of your mind. But Morris does start over, amid the varied and seemingly meaningful images of California: everything from the La Brea tar pits to the Christmas laser show at Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral to dolphins playing in the surf at Malibu. And where her California journey, vividly recounted in Angels and Aliens, ultimately leads her is yet another very common story, so common that I think many readers, both male and female, will find it hauntingly familiar. —Alan Ryan

Karen Karbo

By page 9, the reader knows Morris' problem is not the relentless sun of California or the traffic or the brainless bigots she encounters at every turn. It is her faltering relationship with the father of her baby daughter....You don't need a crystal ball to see where all this is headed. Fortunately, by the end of her journey, Morris does too.
—New York Times Book Review

Karen Karbo

By page 9, the reader knows Morris' problem is not the relentless sun of California or the traffic or the brainless bigots she encounters at every turn. It is her faltering relationship with the father of her baby daughter....You don't need a crystal ball to see where all this is headed. Fortunately, by the end of her journey, Morris does too. -- The New York Times Book Review