Sometimes travel writers, trying to make their tours sound wacky and amusing, reduce the inhabitants to a series of mentally stunted freaks. I found his voice in this patronising, narcissistic, and odious.

Gimlette did a lot of background reading for this, and I wished often that I was reading his source material on the history of Newfoundland, rather than his filter on it. I also wanted to know about Canada instead of his family history and tenuous ancestral connections with the place. ( )

There are some travel books where you wonder that every person the writer met had an amazing story to tell. Then there are books where it seems like the author puts in everyone he meets, regardless of whether they're interesting or not. That's the case here. The author's "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig" fell into the first category, which made me have high expectations here. But the history here isn't as interesting, and there's a lot more of the author in it (and he doesn't make himself and the tangentially-related family history seem as interesting). I kept waiting for the twist that would make all the history hang together in an interesting way, but it didn't happen. ( )