This is my first ever CBR review, cut me some slack on the title?
The stories of the travels of three young women over the course of a few months in the 1990’s (told through a collection of journal entries) was better than expected, but not great. The three main characters were believable, though not especially likable or compelling. A couple of the the secondary characters were interesting, but most read as one-dimension-only. The frequently overlapping adventures and just-missed-each-other scenarios were unbelievably far-fetched (to be fair though, this seemed intentional by the author). I did think that the format of (nothing but) journal entries would become tedious, but never found it to be so. According to the book’s amazon.com page, the author describes the novel as “a female version of Into the Wild meets Breaking Bad.” This is not a bad way to give someone an idea about the story being told – there is hiking, camping, survival skills, drug use and drug dealing – but in my opinion, the novel suffers a little from both comparisons. Overall I’d say the novel is pretty well-written, though I didn’t love the stories being told. For those who care to know: there are frequent references to drug use (marijuana and pills) and drug dealing in the story. Both violence and sex occur in the novel, but neither is too explicitly described (there are some fights, some gun ‘play’, two instances of rape and an abduction-but also stone sculpting and vegetarian cooking-I mean, it’s not all violent). This is probably not a story I would have read otherwise, but I did receive a complimentary e-copy in exchange for my honest review.