I was excited to get a copy of All the Way to the Tigers based on the location of the book and the premise. I found I struggled to make a connection that would allow the book to stay with me. I do feel it was well written and I appreciated the short chapters. It felt a little disjointed at times and was more random thoughts than a congruent story. I loved the descriptive language used in the book for the cities and villages.

3.5 stars but rounding to 4

Thanks to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for a review copy in exchange for my honest review.

"Just a few minutes more," this book started with the plaintive cry of children everywhere, then in the turn of a blade, an accident occurs and author Mary Morris breaks her ankle. I felt her pain, I too broke my ankle when turning resulting in two plates and nine screws. I too worried that I would never walk right again and only wear orthopedic shoes. But time moves on and determination can pull you through most things, for Mary it took her on a trip to see tigers. I love travel books and explorations of new places, I also like memoirs and personal development stories, this book had both so win win. It was also filled with beautiful quotes about tigers and some interesting facts. My favorite one was "It's clearly easier to get the snake out of the sack than it is to shove it back" (loc 1152). The only reason this book was not rated higher was that I wasn't sure of all of her facts ( will we really start killing each other with baseball bats if we do not eat for two days? loc 309) and I wasn't that compelled by the stuff about her childhood and parents.

Absolutely one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year (2020)! My mind was sent off in many directions. . . pulling up maps of India, adding Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to my reading list, googling tigers of all stripes. And acquainting myself with this author – new to me.

I couldn’t put the book down until the end – through the afterword and acknowledgments! There is humor, wry and witty, and a whimsical aspect to this author’s writing that beckons me to each new section. The short observations that weave the travel tale forward with the backward glances at relevant memories her current travel experiences unearth are charming and universal. Nothing goes to plan, as ever, and of all the things we have in common it is that – life’s a mess. Popping the gems out of the mess and compellingly communicating them to others – that is the talent, the gift. She’s got it.


A Sincere Thanks to Mary Morris, Doubleday Books, Nan A. Talese and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review.

I’ve read Mary Morris’s earlier travel memoirs, so it was like catching up with an old friend when I picked up All the Way to the Tigers. I appreciated her honesty when frustrated on her travels as things didn’t always go according to plan. So many authors feel they need to wrap up the story in a pretty package by the final page, but that is not realistic.

I requested this book from NetGalley because I knew Mary Morris had written *something* that I liked, but as tends to be the case with me, I could not remember what. (It was “Nothing to Declare”, which sticks in my brain as the book I was reading when my dad died.) This is a sort of half-travel memoir that flashes between the author’s trip to India where she hoped to spot a tiger in the wild and the life-altering accident that she suffered a few years before the trip. It’s not action-packed, just good, solid memoir writing that makes me want to check out some of her other books that I’ve missed.

I liked this book, but didn't connect to it as profoundly as I had hoped to. I liked the way it is told in many short chapters, almost like a long series of personal vignettes and the writing was eloquent. I think it's fair to compare this book to "Wild" and could recommend it to fans of that book or authors like Bill Bryson.

Although an interesting way to write a memoir, this one has no staying power for me. I loved the concept that Morris was searching for the elusive tiger in India, but the back and forth time lapse, although making sense in the context of this book, was disconcerting for me. I felt like I was reading random thoughts. I am glad she got to see a tiger. I never did while in India. What I did like in this book was the description of the villages and cities she passed through on the search.

The premise of this book is intriguing, and while Morris is clearly a talented writer with an arsenal of adventures and stories, I struggled to connect. I also would have appreciated more recognition and analysis of privilege. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy.

I wanted to like Mary Morris's "All the Way to the Tigers" much more than I actually did. I have a large big cat library and I'm always excited to see a new title appear that's centered on these lovely animals. This book follows much the same format as Ruth Padel's "Tigers in Red Weather" as it sees a woman journeying to see tigers as a form of recovery. Morris is recovering from a severe injury and the attendant disruption of her life. Unfortunately, the tiger aspects of the book consist of scattered quotes and anecdotes; the main content is a sort of memoir that discusses how Morris became the woman she is and why she needs to see a tiger. This approach does not appeal to me as a reader as I feel it usurps the narrative (and how many of us have the privilege to enjoy a tiger quest as a form of healing) and makes the book much more a discussion of the way to the self than the way to tigers

In All the Way To The Tigers, Mary Morris masterfully weaves her account of traveling to India on a quest to see a tiger in 2011 together with tales from a life-changing injury in 2008 and scenes from her childhood. And tigers. Vignettes of tigers in the wild, and tigers encountering people, sprinkled throughout the book like treats. There's no way this book should work, and yet...it absolutely does. It provided me the wonderful experience of turning the pages not just to answer the question, "what happens next?" but to see what new world Morris would introduce in each new chapter. It was magical.

I highly recommend this memoir, especially to anyone who feels stuck in one place but longs to escape and explore.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I love memoirs and am a huge fan of when writers can weave nature in to their narrative, so everything about the premise for this story intrigued me.  Sadly, this one did not work for me.  I never connected with the author - the writing tone keeps you at arms length instead of drawing you in to her world.  The constant jumping from present to past was not seamless and came across as quite distracting and choppy. 
I did enjoy the added tidbits about nature conservation and animal facts and I could see what she was trying to accomplish by finding her tiger and ultimately herself, but in the end I found the story to be incredibly anti-climatic.

An enjoyable travelogue of Indian tiger safaris and a mediation on growing older. As both an adult figure skater and someone who's been on some frustrating tiger safaris in India, i related to Mary's experience and found her thoughts on growing older and symbolism of tigers to be very interesting to read. It's a short book - it didn't take me very long to finish - but the prose is poetic and transporting.

I’ve recommended Mary Morris’s Nothing To Declare: Memoirs of A Woman Traveling Alone over the years, was very happy to read that her latest book, All The Way To The Tigers, was another travelogue/family history/personal growth saga. Thanks to Doubleday Books/Nan Talese and NetGalley, I received an advance copy in return for this honest review.

In 2008, on the eve of her long-awaited sabbatical, an ice skating accident shattered her leg so seriously her doctor admitted later to her he wondered if she would ever walk again. The next three years were filled with surgeries and extensive rehabilitation, as she worked toward a dream trip to India in search of a F2F encounter with a tiger. Morris has had a lifetime attraction to tigers, perhaps because she has been such a successful woman alone: “Unlike lions, there is no word for tigers together. That’s because they never are.”

Throughout the book, she offers wonderful tidbits about tigers as they are in nature, and also as they have become familiar in popular culture. As someone who always felt that Roy (of Siegfried and Roy fame) earned what happened to him, I appreciated reading that Mantacore attacked Roy because “…months before the attack Roy had stopped feeding the tigers and stopped whispering to them…broke the bond and the tiger felt no loyalty to comply.”

Bouncing between 2008 when she was injured to 2011, when she took her long-awaited trip to India, she shares thoughts about her terrible, sad childhood. At least, she generally presents it as sad, with her mother appearing be an extremely unhappily married woman and her father being loud and overbearing. But she admits that “Harvard University study shows that creative people tend to remember their childhoods as unhappy even if they were not.” There are some nice memories in there, for example “It is my father who tucks me in. He sits at the side of my bed, making up stories about a homesick snowflake…a brook…sings me the Whiffenpoof song about the poor little lambs…until I drift to sleep. Not my mother.”

Her unhappiness growing up and an eye-opening trip to Europe with her mother led her to begin her life of extensive travel, and although she is desperate to have an encounter with a ferocious animal in the wild, she admits “I’ve never courted danger…for me, it was always about escape.”

Once she makes it to India, she explores the plight of tigers in the wild, sharing that it is the”…expansion of roads that impinges the most on the tiger’s habitat.” As always, her descriptive abilities are incredible: “A long chaotic industrial strip, filled with tire outlets, packs of wild dogs, sacred cows, feral pigs devouring trash. Women in bright-colored saris balance water jugs on their heads. Girls on mopeds, their heads and faces completely covered, dark glasses on, zip by. Women crouch, weaving garlands of flowers.“

There are some thought-provoking lines that really stood out to me, for example:
• “…about travel. The point isn’t to stay in one place. It is to move on…seizing the moment, the hour, the day, with the understanding that it isn’t forever.”
• “…why Buddhism took root in India. Because Buddhism teaches you how to sit quietly and be present.”
• “…I realized that silent is an anagram for listen. It is the voice that comes from the silence that the writer or artist must listen to.”
• “we are only seven meals away from anarchy.”


Her exploration of both the physical environment during her tiger trip and her own lessons along the way bring her to the big epiphany that may affect her future travel and whether she is now less inclined to go solo: what she “…learned along the way that I could do this on my own. I know that I can. I also know that it is all right to have someone.”

I found the self-exploration and the descriptive passages to be as wonderful as I expected, but I wasn’t as enthralled with the extensive bouncing back and forth between 2008, when the life-altering accident happened, and 2011, when she finally took her trip “all the way to the tigers.” Four stars rather than five, mostly because Nothing To Declare is clearly a five, and this one was a shade less awesome for me. Still, highly recommended.

I loved this travel memoir and adventures. It’s beautifully written and I can imagine myself there with her.

Loved All the Way to the Tigers! Mary Morris' story was so inspiring. And made me want to go on a tiger trek myself, although preferably in a warmer month!

A wonderful memoir by Morris. Chapters interspersed with a travelogue of a trip to India to see a tiger, a chronicle of conavelesing from a broken ankle and surgery, factoids about Tigers, and memories of childhood. It all comes together under Morris' creative hand.


Copy provided by the Publisher and NetGalley

This travel memoir is anything but typical. Morris was planning a long sabbatical overseas when a simple ice skating trip landed her in a wheelchair. Surgeries and rehab kept Morris from her trip of a lifetime, so instead of visiting exotic Morocco, she was reading at home on her sofa. Doctors weren’t sure she would ever walk again, but Morris mad a conscious decision to go “all the way to the tigers”. She finally makes it to India, alone, to search for the rare and elusive tiger. This book is about so much more then travel, it’s about the strength inherent in all women to do the seemingly impossible, to follow a dream, to be whatever they want to be