Happy First Day of November! I hope you all had an excellent October and Halloween, and that you have a great November!
I’m back with another book review, and this time it’s “The Lost Girls” by Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, and Amanda Pressner! This is a little different than the usual book review because it’s a non-fiction book (and I have reviewed such books before, though rarely compared to straight-up fiction), so I was very interested in reading and also reviewing it. Here’s a summary so we know what it’s about:
“Three friends, each on the brink of a quarter-life crisis, make a pact to quit their high pressure New York City media jobs and leave behind their friends, boyfriends, and everything familiar to embark on a year-long backpacking adventure around the world in The Lost Girls.”
I really enjoyed reading the parts of the book that focused specifically on their experiences of the places they went to, as well as the people there. The part about Africa was one of my favourites out of the many experiences they discussed in the book. I especially love the imagery they use when describing the areas they travel to, because that definitely helps me imagine the situations they encountered and experienced and put myself in their shoes. I also like how, for at least some places they visited, they did their best to discuss the cultural context of the places they visited (though this happened more in the latter half of this book compared to the beginning).
One of the pitfalls of this book, unfortunately, is that the book tends to linger too much on the romances (or attempts at romance). I picked up this book not for the romance, but rather for the travel experiences which I wish they spent more time describing, especially in the middle of the book. All the romance mentions in this book just made me want to skip those sections overall. Speaking of not spending enough time discussing the travel experiences, I also wish they hadn’t spent so long in the first three-to-four chapters setting up the exposition for why they embarked on their travels in the first place. I felt like a lot of it could have been condensed into one-to-two chapters instead to allow for more time to describe the travel experiences.
As for the actual description of the travel experiences themselves, I also wish that they spent a bit more time as of how it impacted our authors. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if they really had a big takeaway from their trip other than being in a different place other than where they come from, and so when they described having one of those takeaway experiences, I was confused as of how they made those connections.
Another pitfall as that these three authors have very similar writing styles. It’s hard to distinguish which person’s point of view you’re reading unless you pay attention to whose point of view it is listed in the titles of each chapters.
Overall, I’m rating this book 2.5 out of 5 stars.
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Great post 😁
Thanks! 🙂