Each month I'll be reviewing one book that you just HAVE to read. This month sees Amy Baker's Miss-Adventures: a tale of ignoring life advice while backpacking around South America come under the spot light.
Other than having an unnecessarily long title (says the man who has a book with the tongue twisting title Jon and Harry’s Year of Microadventure) this book doesn’t have a lot wrong with it at all. In fact, I’d say it was one of the best reads I’ve had in ages.
I’m not a literary critic by any accounts. My judge of a good book is how quickly I finish it. More often than not, I’ll have my nose pressed into a book that I am really enjoying for far shorter a time than a book that is seriously dragging. Because of this I tend to finish brilliant books in a couple of days whereas awful tripe could go on for several weeks.
Amy Baker’s book (which we will abbreviate to the catchy MAATOILAWBASA) fitted well and truly into the couple of days’ camp. How can you put a book down that continues you make you smile for the entire time you are reading it? How can you drag yourself away before you find out the next stupidly insane thing that the main character (Amy herself) gets up to?
Amy’s writing genre could be called ‘Comedy Travel’ and it’s definitely an area I would love to see expanded with more books. I’d say she’s like a funnier version of Michael Palin, or a slightly less cynical Kyle Pilkington. She’s quite happy putting her innermost thoughts on the page. There’s a real honesty and relatability there that I immediately connected with. She’s not some high thinking philosopher but a normal (well, fairly normal) girl with normal thoughts, like worrying about what other people think of her and behaving completely inappropriately around good-looking Bolivians.
I’ll admit that the first few chapters are pretty tame compared to the drug induced hysteria, the impromptu brush with the drug cartel and the incident outside the hostel in Peru (You’ll have to read it to find out what happened. It’s worth the suspense) that appear in later chapters. Amy tells it all in her comic style and I dare you to read it and not laugh out loud at least once.
Buy MAATOILAWBASA. Buy it for your friends. Don’t buy it for your Granny!