Review: The Lost Girls

The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World. by Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, Amanda Pressner is a travel memoir written by three girlfriends who leave their lives in the Big Apple behind to travel the world for a year on a trip where they learn about different cultures, languages and customs. However, their most important lessons are the power of taking chances, the gift of self-discovery and the grace of great friendships.

Jen, Holly and Amanda are each firmly entrenched in the rat race of New York City working long hours and struggling to advance their careers; at the same time, however, they are approaching thirty and beginning to get restless.  As they face their quarter-life crises, they decide to take the trip of a lifetime together and travel around the world.  Their list of destinations is impressive and includes Bali, India, Peru and Kenya.

My thoughts
The chapters of the book alternate between Holly, Jen and Amanda as they chronicle their adventures in each destination - some destinations are told from the perspectives of all three girls while other destinations are told only from one girl's perspective.  The alternation gives the reader a well-rounded experience of each destination and the trip as a whole; however, at times, it seemed superfluous to have each girl recount their observations.  Their points of view were not remarkably different from each other so it wasn't always necessary to hear each girl's experiences of a particular destination.  The book is over 500 pages long and I feel it could have been shortened by about 100 pages without my losing very much of the girls' adventure.

This minor quibble with the length, however, in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the travel memoir - I loved seeing these destinations through their eyes.  I am an avowed travel addict and am most happy when I enter an airport, passport in hand.  As I read through the memoir, I found myself adding destinations to that mental list of "must see" places - for example, I definitely want to go to Peru and Kenya.  I have also been to many of the places the girls traveled to  -Vietnam, Bali, India, Cambodia and Thailand - it was such a thrill to relive those trips by reading about the destinations in this memoir!

The book, however, is more than a collection of city guides and tales of adventure in far-flung destinations.  It is really a story of how these three women took risks and left the safety of jobs and boyfriends behind to see a bit of the world and ensure they seized the chance to live life to the fullest.  Their commitment to turning their backs on the security of lives lived according to plan is what most inspired me about these women  - I am not sure I could to it which is why I admire it so much. Oh and one more thing - they have inspired me to take a trip to New Zealand!  Take a look at the blue sky in this picture below and you will understand why!

Credit: The Lost Girls

I read this book as part of the TLC Book Tour - check out the site for a list of other tour hosts and links to their reviews.  Thank you to Harper Collins for providing a copy of the book for review.