Trazee In-Depth: At Home in the World Book Review

While you can’t always travel, you can always read about it. My most recent literary adventure was a moving, funny and relatable tale called At Home in the World by Tsh Oxenreider.

Oxenreider is the author of Notes from a Blue Bike and Organized Simplicity, and she’s been featured in The Washington Post, CNN, Real Simple Magazine and more. She’s also the founder of a community blog, The Art of Simple, a wife and a mother.

In At Home in the World, Oxenreider chronicles her family’s journey from China to Thailand, Australia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, France, Croatia and beyond. The story is written in an almost journal-like style that shares Oxenreider’s personal thoughts, feelings and experiences as she travels the world with her husband and three kids.

As someone without children, I wasn’t sure how much I’d connect with the book, but I found it extremely relatable, particularly when it comes to Oxenreider’s conflicting desire to travel and her love and appreciation for the comforts of home.

The story begins with Oxenreider and her husband’s bold decision to sell their home and take their kids on a nine-month journey around the world. They pack as much as they can into backpacks, choosing just the absolute essentials and put the rest in storage. They spend days on end planning each flight, booking each rental home and hotel room and organizing finances before saying goodbye to their hometown, families and friends.

The decision the Oxenreider family makes is one many consider and dream about, but few actually put into action. This family, who so courageously leaves the comforts, safety and conveniences of a Portland suburb for a life on the road, left me mesmerized.

The tale of their journey is by no means sugarcoated. The real challenges that come with traveling with three children under the age of 10, from home schooling and home sickness to actual sickness, are detailed, sometimes humorously, and sometimes in a way that evokes profound fear and sadness. Oxenreider details not only the challenges of living a life on the road with young children, but also the challenges it poses for her marriage and the personal hurdles she works through along the way.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, in addition to the authentic nature of the storytelling, was the way in which Oxenreider maintains a sense of individuality and independence throughout the book. It is not simply a guidebook for how to travel the world with kids or how to maintain a happy marriage on the road, but a story of one woman who struggles to unite two different parts of herself — the introverted homebody who takes comfort in life’s lovely familiarities and the restless, adventurous seeker of new experiences.

“Wanderlust and my longing for home are birthed from the same place: a desire to find the ultimate spot this side of heaven. When I stir soup at my stove, I drift to a distant island. When I’m on the road with my backpack, my heart wanders back to my couch, my favorite coffee cup … The way to reconcile my wanderlust with life back home is to lean in to the tension, to extol life’s haunting inability to ever fully satisfy. Life’s full of paradoxes, after all.”

Each chapter of the book starts with a witty or insightful quote about the importance of traveling, and the chapters are interspersed with poems written by Oxenreider that perfectly capture her emotions throughout her journey.

From taking in the majesty of Victoria Falls and snorkeling off the coast of Australia to indulging in iskender kebap in Turkey to releasing floating lanterns in Thailand, the Oxenreider family finds a sense of home everywhere they go in the world, and their experiences, as recorded by the matriarch, are well worth a read.