Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Carolynn, a former flight attendant, travel agent, and travel photographer chronicles her experiences visiting and exploring 30 countries over the course of 10 years. Readers will value her unique perspective and genuine passion for journeying throughout the world.
Prose: Carolynn's prose style is candid, warm, and finely detailed. The author conveys her emotions and observations in an authentic and vivid manner.
Originality: Though Carolynn doesn't offer a truly distinctive 'hook,' her professions within the travel industry, as well as her striking photographs, provide the work a novel element.
Character/Execution: The author's account of her travels, and her determination to travel to as many places as possible, makes for an engrossing narrative.
Date Submitted: December 04, 2023
AMidwest-based author shares her experiences traveling the world as a student, flight attendant, and travel agent in this memoir that includes her travel photography.
In 2013, while attending college in the Midwest, Carolynn took her final semester abroad in England. Since classes met only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she proceeded to take trips throughout Europe via long weekends. This book is a collection of her musings on 15 excursions she took that semester. She includes additional entries on countries in Asia, South America, and Africa as well as various U.S. states that she toured post-college as a flight attendant and later as a corporate travel agent. Each journal entry begins with a summary page highlighting, among other details, both logistical and philosophical lessons learned during her trip. Within these pieces, she also mentions personal issues, including trauma from being bullied as a young girl to being nervous about both romantic and friend relationships, eventually coming to realize, through therapy, that these anxieties, in part, were fueling her desire to constantly travel. In 2022, Carolynn went with her husband to Costa Rica, where they celebrated six years together and she achieved her goal of visiting 30 countries before she turned 30. In her memoir, Carolynn, who now runs a business selling her travel photography, includes lovely examples of her work and striking destination descriptions, from diving into New Zealand glowworm caves to witnessing “the cotton candy sky blend into the waves below” back in Minnesota. She’s refreshingly forthright about her insecurities and offers an inspiring message to be open to new people and experiences, for example by staying in hostels: “It didn’t matter who you were, where you were going, or why you were there—each person was ready for an adventure and almost always invited everyone else to go with them. It was the [most] perfect example of inclusivity I’d ever experienced in my life.”
Insightful observances and tips for fellow journeyers, combined with inward explorations.
