Jennifer L. Leo

Subtitle: Funny Women Write From the Road

This is a collection of essays written by women about their travels. Most feature foreign or adventure travel: Africa, Europe, Mexico. A few are very adventurous: safaris, river-rafting, Burning Man. Some are more generic: packing, fear of flying. Many featured encounters with local fauna: elephants, dolphins, lions. Some are hilarious, especially those that include missteps in translation; a woman who thought she was commenting on a menu item but show more instead was using a colloquial expression for a penis (to the understandable consternation of her male waiter) had me guffawing out loud.

On the whole, an entertaining diversion while I was on a plane traveling to my own vacation in a national park. show less

This collection includes tales written by women travelling all over the world. They are united in the fact that they are all written by women, and they are all meant to be humorous. I was rather disappointed with the results.

One of the problems is that the excerpts in this collection are all quite short, not long enough to really delve into anything. The second issue was that most of these tales weren't actually very funny. The funniest pieces were those written by known humorists and show more comedians, like Anne LaMott and Ellen DeGeneres. Others try, but don't succeed. I don't find a blow-by-blow account of Burning Man to be funny, I find it to be pathetic.

Most significantly, though, there seemed to be no good reason for this to be a collection of women's travel writing. This book did not interrogate culturally specific ideas of gender. Instead, there were stories about needing tampons in Paris. It seemed as if the editors of this series had no concept of why there might be a call for a collection of women's travel stories. This anthology is proof positive that simply stamping "women" on something does not create deeper meaning. It is the editor's job to explain the reasoning, and that simply doesn't happen here.

In conclusion, I offer the following quote from the introduction: "If you think about it, how could travel be anything but funny? Especially for women." Indeed. show less

was looking for a light and humorous read when I stumbled across this on my shelves. I mean, how could a collection subtitled Funny Women Write From the Road miss the mark on that, right? Well, either my funny bone had gone on vacation when I read this or I have a different sense of humor than the editor. This is a collection of essays, several of which are excerpted from longer works that I have already read (and nothing makes me crabbier than having paid good money for something that isn't show more new content), centered on the travel misadventures suffered by women who have a host of jobs that take them all over the world. A few of the essays did indeed inspire chuckles but there were an awful lot more that left me scratching my head as to why they were considered funny. Now, I generally find that essay collections by multiple authors do tend to be spotty in terms of holding my interest (some do, others, regrettably, just don't) but it was sad to realize that travel humor is equally likely to run the gamut of appeal for me. Of course, my sense of humor runs to the self-deprecating and thoroughly embarrassing (vomit, poo, clothing mishaps, etc.) so other readers may find more humor in the less obvious essays than I did. I loved the concept of the book but I wish I had gotten more out of the execution (or maybe it's just that someone wee'ed in my cornflakes the morning I read this). show less

Spotty but riveting collection of tales from the darker side of adventure travel. Some are howlingly funny, and one, the one about the bot fly, will gross me out forever. The editing had some gaps, most notably "breaks" for "brakes" numerous times, which a pedant can find terribly distracting.