Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home - Books

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Already hailed as "brave, emotional, and gorgeously written" by Frances Mayes and "like a piece of dark chocolate--bittersweet, satisfying, and finished all too soon" by Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, this is a unique memoir about the search for identity through love, hunger, and food.

Jim Harrison says, "TRAIL OF CRUMBS reminds me of what heavily costumed and concealed waifs we all are. Kim Sunee tells us so much about the French that I never learned in 25 trips to Paris, but mostly about the terrors and pleasure of that infinite octopus, love. A fine book."

When Kim Sunee was three years old, her mother took her to a marketplace, deposited her on a bench with a fistful of food, and promised she'd be right back. Three days later a policeman took the little girl, clutching what was now only a fistful of crumbs, to a police station and told her that she'd been abandoned by her mother.

Fast-forward almost 20 years and Kim's life is unrecognizable. Adopted by a young New Orleans couple, she spends her youth as one of only two Asian children in her entire community. At the age of 21, she becomes involved with a famous French businessman and suddenly finds herself living in France, mistress over his houses in Provence and Paris, and stepmother to his eight year-old daughter.

Kim takes readers on a lyrical journey from Korea to New Orleans to Paris and Provence, along the way serving forth her favorite recipes. A love story at heart, this memoir is about the search for identity and a book that will appeal to anyone who is passionate about love, food, travel, and the ultimate search for self. (2008)

Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Disappointing October 22, 2008
This memoir is self indulgent and repetitive. You can't help wonder if the author used her connections to the famous Frenchmen in her story to get a book contract, otherwise I can't image why a publisher would agree to this story. Although I didn't care for her self-absorbed story, I was intrigued by the many interesting recipes she included throughout. Perhaps she should have written only a recipe book and left the memoir alone.

3 out of 5 stars

Good Flavor to Start - wanes over time August 27, 2008
I enjoyed the presence of recipes and food in this book. After a while, it seems that the author loses her flavor for food and passion. I liked the tales of food, of flavors from Louisana and the freshness of tastes from the south of France.

However - the part of the book on Korea seems misguided. Flying in first class with your boyfriend doesnt seem to be a guaranteed way to find ones identity. Was she going for herself, or for him?

For those of us who spent our twenties in another country, there certainly is a longing to find out who you are - and this is compounded when living and working in a second language. Clearly the writer was thrown into a role much older than she anticipated as a stepmother and madame of a flowing, vivid household.

The book didnt have much about hunger, but certainly a lot on finding out who you are, especially when living overseas. I'd love more cooking and less drama in future prose.

4 out of 5 stars

A Book to Be Savored July 10, 2008
It's not feasible for me to live for several years in Paris and Provence with a charming Frenchman. Nor will I ever be 23 years old again. However, Kim Sunee's book afforded me some of the same pleasures, mixed with a poignant description of some of the problems. Like "slow food," the book should be savored for its fascinating sights, smells, and tastes and for its honest portrait of a young woman who learns to speak Swedish and French, prepare unforgettable meals, and find her own way in the world.

2 out of 5 stars

Overwrought recipes, boring existential crisis July 6, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

OK, here's the deal. I get the quarterlife existential crisis, I do. But when you're suffering said crisis in Provence at your sugar daddy's villa, and you have no job, no responsibilities and no sense of humor--and then you write a mopey 350-page book about it--that crisis becomes unrelatable and obnoxious.

While she's sunning naked on Corsica, she feels isolated and unloved. OK, that's legit, but her vague misery, as conveyed through Sunee's admittedly excellent writing, means that I don't even get to enjoy Corsica by extension!

The sights and smells and tastes of Provence sound wonderful, but the extended descriptions of cunnilingus by her old, rich French boyfriendm and her interpersonal relationships in general are just tiresome, exhausting and as unfulfilling for the reader as they are for Sunee. As a rule, none of the humans in this memoir are drawn half as well as the dishes. You don't get a real sense of what the people look like, where they came from or what contributes to their various flavors.

I found myself sympathizing with the mother she finds so critical and cold. The mother obviously is trying but failing to convey the absence of substance and maturity in her daughter's life, but Sunee is so angry (she claims her sister is the angry one, but it's obviously her), that she ignores the warning entirely.

For that matter, I couldn't figure out for the life of me what she saw in any of her boyfriends other than privilege and heavy-handed, controlling gift-giving and empty promises of salvation. She was young. I get that, too. Almost all young women have made the same mistaken emotional investments, but she doesn't seem to learn anything, she doesn't have any wisdom to convey after having survived the suffocation of the bell jar, she isn't more interesting or wiser after it all, she just speaks French fluently and is passably continental.

Basically, this book is too long, the author is too self-serious, and the life lived is too self-indulgent and spoiled to be genuinely interesting to anyone but the writer and her immediate family.

I was expecting M.F.K. Fisher, Betty McDonald or Mildred Armstrong Kalish, but this woman, articulate though she may be, doesn't come close to achieving their level of perception, wisdom or general literary appeal. I don't recommend this one. Sorry.

5 out of 5 stars

Romance, Provence, Gastronomy July 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

What a fascinating book. Vibrant characters, vivid descriptive passages, a passionate love story, and genuine French recipes. I couldn't put it down. It left me wishing I knew what happened after the last page....we need more Kim Sunee!

Good Grape Wine Company