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nstinch54's review against another edition
1.0
** I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. **
This book was NOT what I expected at all. Instead of the a book full of adventures she experienced traveling, I got a book of adventures and a collection of one-night-stands in almost every single story that's in this book.
Not only was this book not what I expected, but the author seemed to constantly put herself into unsafe situations that leads to her being drugged by a tainted drink while she was in Peru, someone she was with was drugged in Mexico, and she seemed to constantly need to try to escape men she drunkenly slept with and then regretted the next morning. And clearly she doesn't learn from these mistakes as this happens over and over again to her.
Sorry, but I don't find that to be entertaining. And if it weren't for the fact that this was an ARC, I would have DNFed this book at about 20%.
This book was NOT what I expected at all. Instead of the a book full of adventures she experienced traveling, I got a book of adventures and a collection of one-night-stands in almost every single story that's in this book.
Not only was this book not what I expected, but the author seemed to constantly put herself into unsafe situations that leads to her being drugged by a tainted drink while she was in Peru, someone she was with was drugged in Mexico, and she seemed to constantly need to try to escape men she drunkenly slept with and then regretted the next morning. And clearly she doesn't learn from these mistakes as this happens over and over again to her.
Sorry, but I don't find that to be entertaining. And if it weren't for the fact that this was an ARC, I would have DNFed this book at about 20%.
thesassybookworm's review against another edition
2.0
Didn't particularly enjoy this one. Too much focus on her personal life vs travel. I also found it a bit chaotic to read at times. It just wasn't a great book for me.
*ARC via NetGalley*
*ARC via NetGalley*
clp412's review against another edition
5.0
I enjoyed Suzanne's memoir/travel advice book! This had many funny stories and also adventures that she shared throughout her years of travel. It is broken into sections with similar stories in each section written in short chapters. I love her vulnerability and I definitely connected to some of the stories where I had similar experiences of cultural misunderstandings or trusting strangers that I wouldn't normally do in the US. This would make a great gift for the holidays for anyone that loves travel or is anxious to get back to international travel!
rigs32's review against another edition
2.0
I am really torn on this book. I love a good travel memoir. I enjoyed the writing style of each story, but the timeline was all over the place, so I didn't really get a sense of the author's overall growth/journey. Many of the stories didn't do much to introduce the situation or other people involved, so I spent many pages trying to figure out who I was reading about and why. If there was more exposition and/or a more logical order to the stories, my rating would definitely be higher. Note: I did receive a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
thenarrative's review against another edition
3.0
Bad Tourist by Suzanne Roberts
Rating 3.5/5 Stars
Published by U.Nebraska Press
Published On 1 October 2020
Thank you to Netgalley, University of Nebraska Press, and of course, Suzanne Roberts, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Covid 19 has put my love of travel on hold and this book is one of the reasons I love travel writing as a genre - it is so immersive and necessary for the world we have lived in the past 18 months. I love to travel, and not being able to - I’ve turned to books to feed that hunger. I enjoyed this book beyond that for the laughing factor. There were a few moments where I just broke down laughing! I did find there to be a few poorly constructed parts in the essays, but for the most part this book is a positive for me. I recommend it if you miss traveling as much as I do.
Rating 3.5/5 Stars
Published by U.Nebraska Press
Published On 1 October 2020
Thank you to Netgalley, University of Nebraska Press, and of course, Suzanne Roberts, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Covid 19 has put my love of travel on hold and this book is one of the reasons I love travel writing as a genre - it is so immersive and necessary for the world we have lived in the past 18 months. I love to travel, and not being able to - I’ve turned to books to feed that hunger. I enjoyed this book beyond that for the laughing factor. There were a few moments where I just broke down laughing! I did find there to be a few poorly constructed parts in the essays, but for the most part this book is a positive for me. I recommend it if you miss traveling as much as I do.
slbeckmann's review against another edition
1.0
Thank you to the author, University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This book of so-called travel essays did not go down well with me. I didn't care for the self-indulgent tone of a woman who continuously and consciously makes bad choices that put her in harm's way, spends way too much time agonizing about her current and past bed/life partners and does it all from a position of privilege that she seems completely unaware of. The amazing and diverse countries and cultures she visits seem to make little or no impact on her - but then I can only judge by what she has chosen to share in her writing. The editing is erratic at best, and does the writer no favors. All in all, I was glad to have this done with and would not recommend.
This book of so-called travel essays did not go down well with me. I didn't care for the self-indulgent tone of a woman who continuously and consciously makes bad choices that put her in harm's way, spends way too much time agonizing about her current and past bed/life partners and does it all from a position of privilege that she seems completely unaware of. The amazing and diverse countries and cultures she visits seem to make little or no impact on her - but then I can only judge by what she has chosen to share in her writing. The editing is erratic at best, and does the writer no favors. All in all, I was glad to have this done with and would not recommend.
maggierachael's review against another edition
1.0
God do I hate it when white women try to be deep about world travel.
Suzanne Roberts’ new novel, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel sounds promising when you read its summary: the novel “takes [readers] across four continents to fifteen countries, showing [them] what not to do when traveling.” It sounds like any other armchair travel book - lush descriptions of exotic locales, fascinating stories about wildlife and culture and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. It came off alluringly enough that I picked up a digital ARC without a second thought...and turned out to be massively disappointed.
From page one, it’s difficult to escape the clearly well-off position Roberts is writing this book from. Sure, she says she’s not wealthy - not enough to afford Louis Vuitton luggage, as she notes in her Vegas anecdote - but to travel as extensively as she does speaks of a kind of luxury only afforded to a small percentage of people. Most people, even single women, don’t get the opportunity to travel outside the country even once in their lives, and that fact presses hard on the entire thesis of this book. Life lessons learned in India or Greece or Mexico are difficult to sympathize with when most people’s idea of a vacation involves Disney World at best, and usually with their entire family rather than solo. Roberts traveling and the frivolous choices she makes on her way posit an upper middle class vision of the world without leaving a foot in the door for everyone else to get in, and thus leaves a bad taste in the readers’ mouth before they’ve even gotten to the main course.
And I say this as someone who’s done extensive traveling. Living in and exploring the places I’ve been in Europe has helped me find myself, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have money, or that my study abroad program wasn’t entirely tuition-funded. And going to Europe doesn’t make me qualified to talk about deep universal truths like Roberts feels going to Panama has -I just know that because I have ADHD, my brain does better in a stimulating city environment, and that’s a good enough truth for me. The six months I lived in London certainly aren’t enough to make a book out of.
And yet, I’m fairly certain that the time I saw a guy dressed as Freddie Mercury in drag on the Tube was a more enriching cultural experience than the entirety of this book.
Roberts sections Bad Tourist into short highlights from various locations, each with a different story. I appreciated the brevity that kept me moving through the book, but each snippet of a story
was too short to really glean any kind of moral lesson or understanding from, and the writing comes off as a shallow imitation of better travelogues by hitting the same basic “I am a privileged white lady who is learning about my privilege from the horrors of the non-Western world” beats as every travel novel I’ve ever read. The stories are out of order chronologically and follow no real organized form, and Roberts doesn’t even go so far as to explain how these events affected her life as a whole — they just play out like pieces of a film left on the cutting room floor, entirely alone and without the context needed to understand them properly.
Even the anecdotes themselves feel out of order and shoddily spliced together. Roberts will start to tell one tale, then jump back days or weeks earlier in the same trip to give important background that she really could’ve just started out with. It feels messy, not dissimilar to notes jotted down on a phone’s notes app and never sent through a proper editing process. I zoned out and skimmed paragraphs on more than one occasion and didn’t feel like I was missing a single thing.
And I’m sorry, ma’am, but admitting to cheating on your husband in the first quarter of the book isn’t going to help your already poor case, guilty feelings or not.
For a travel memoir, perhaps a good seventy percent of this book focuses on Roberts’ love life. And while it does come with the package as part of the subtitle, the amount of time she spends bemoaning her relationship status and her endless string of foreign one-night stands overwhelms most of the travel aspects of the overall story, enough to make me regret starting it in the first place.
I fully, truly do not care about your cavalcade of boyfriends, Suzanne Roberts. They all seem exactly the same — depthless, annoying caricatures meant to make you look good in hindsight — and after the fourth nearly-identical story with the names switched out, I almost didn’t finish Bad Tourist entirely. You say, “I defined myself through the male gaze”, as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation, and not something that every woman has to learn to unsee themselves through as part of growing up. There’s no need to detail the sordid, gross details of a bunch of one night stands in order to get that across, particularly not in a book supposedly about travel. You talk of not wanting to harp on self-flagellation, and yet that’s exactly what rolls off your writing in waves — by repeating the same anecdotes over and over again,you make your self-shaming public in order to feel some amount of gratitude for yourself, or perhaps a justification for not having any self-confidence.
(As someone with anxiety, I understand that struggle, but at least I try to tamp down my victim complex because of it.)
Additionally, I can’t help but cringe at Roberts’ descriptions of the environments she’s found herself in throughout her life, though she claims to understand that she comes from a place of privilege. Her visuals of the locals she encounters in each of the fifteen countries are no more than paper cutouts, flimsy stereotypes of poverty and exoticism that play up every racist idea ever held by western society - from pickpockets in Central America and beggars in India to alluring men in Greece who speak little to no English. The adults don’t speak English, all of the children are criminals or sex workers, and not one honest portrayal of a non-white individual is offered in the entire book.
This is a woman who argued the price of a French manicure in a foreign country, for goodness sake. Once you reach that point, I refuse to believe that you understand your own privilege.
(Notably, a majority of the places mentioned in this novel are neither European nor English speaking — perhaps in an attempt to make it feel ~exotic~ and special, when really it just comes off as aggressively racist any time she encounters anyone who isn’t a native English speaker. And if it’s not that, it’s coming off as an outdated brand of feminism where it’s still cool for women to judge each other like cheap plastic Regina Georges in place of a plot.)
I’m bummed that my first ever NetGalley arc turned out to be as disappointing as it was. I’m usually a fan of essay collections, but this feels unfinished and poorly constructed, and perhaps comes from a perspective that we’ve had more than enough writing from already.
Suzanne Roberts’ new novel, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel sounds promising when you read its summary: the novel “takes [readers] across four continents to fifteen countries, showing [them] what not to do when traveling.” It sounds like any other armchair travel book - lush descriptions of exotic locales, fascinating stories about wildlife and culture and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. It came off alluringly enough that I picked up a digital ARC without a second thought...and turned out to be massively disappointed.
From page one, it’s difficult to escape the clearly well-off position Roberts is writing this book from. Sure, she says she’s not wealthy - not enough to afford Louis Vuitton luggage, as she notes in her Vegas anecdote - but to travel as extensively as she does speaks of a kind of luxury only afforded to a small percentage of people. Most people, even single women, don’t get the opportunity to travel outside the country even once in their lives, and that fact presses hard on the entire thesis of this book. Life lessons learned in India or Greece or Mexico are difficult to sympathize with when most people’s idea of a vacation involves Disney World at best, and usually with their entire family rather than solo. Roberts traveling and the frivolous choices she makes on her way posit an upper middle class vision of the world without leaving a foot in the door for everyone else to get in, and thus leaves a bad taste in the readers’ mouth before they’ve even gotten to the main course.
And I say this as someone who’s done extensive traveling. Living in and exploring the places I’ve been in Europe has helped me find myself, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have money, or that my study abroad program wasn’t entirely tuition-funded. And going to Europe doesn’t make me qualified to talk about deep universal truths like Roberts feels going to Panama has -I just know that because I have ADHD, my brain does better in a stimulating city environment, and that’s a good enough truth for me. The six months I lived in London certainly aren’t enough to make a book out of.
And yet, I’m fairly certain that the time I saw a guy dressed as Freddie Mercury in drag on the Tube was a more enriching cultural experience than the entirety of this book.
Roberts sections Bad Tourist into short highlights from various locations, each with a different story. I appreciated the brevity that kept me moving through the book, but each snippet of a story
was too short to really glean any kind of moral lesson or understanding from, and the writing comes off as a shallow imitation of better travelogues by hitting the same basic “I am a privileged white lady who is learning about my privilege from the horrors of the non-Western world” beats as every travel novel I’ve ever read. The stories are out of order chronologically and follow no real organized form, and Roberts doesn’t even go so far as to explain how these events affected her life as a whole — they just play out like pieces of a film left on the cutting room floor, entirely alone and without the context needed to understand them properly.
Even the anecdotes themselves feel out of order and shoddily spliced together. Roberts will start to tell one tale, then jump back days or weeks earlier in the same trip to give important background that she really could’ve just started out with. It feels messy, not dissimilar to notes jotted down on a phone’s notes app and never sent through a proper editing process. I zoned out and skimmed paragraphs on more than one occasion and didn’t feel like I was missing a single thing.
And I’m sorry, ma’am, but admitting to cheating on your husband in the first quarter of the book isn’t going to help your already poor case, guilty feelings or not.
For a travel memoir, perhaps a good seventy percent of this book focuses on Roberts’ love life. And while it does come with the package as part of the subtitle, the amount of time she spends bemoaning her relationship status and her endless string of foreign one-night stands overwhelms most of the travel aspects of the overall story, enough to make me regret starting it in the first place.
I fully, truly do not care about your cavalcade of boyfriends, Suzanne Roberts. They all seem exactly the same — depthless, annoying caricatures meant to make you look good in hindsight — and after the fourth nearly-identical story with the names switched out, I almost didn’t finish Bad Tourist entirely. You say, “I defined myself through the male gaze”, as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation, and not something that every woman has to learn to unsee themselves through as part of growing up. There’s no need to detail the sordid, gross details of a bunch of one night stands in order to get that across, particularly not in a book supposedly about travel. You talk of not wanting to harp on self-flagellation, and yet that’s exactly what rolls off your writing in waves — by repeating the same anecdotes over and over again,you make your self-shaming public in order to feel some amount of gratitude for yourself, or perhaps a justification for not having any self-confidence.
(As someone with anxiety, I understand that struggle, but at least I try to tamp down my victim complex because of it.)
Additionally, I can’t help but cringe at Roberts’ descriptions of the environments she’s found herself in throughout her life, though she claims to understand that she comes from a place of privilege. Her visuals of the locals she encounters in each of the fifteen countries are no more than paper cutouts, flimsy stereotypes of poverty and exoticism that play up every racist idea ever held by western society - from pickpockets in Central America and beggars in India to alluring men in Greece who speak little to no English. The adults don’t speak English, all of the children are criminals or sex workers, and not one honest portrayal of a non-white individual is offered in the entire book.
This is a woman who argued the price of a French manicure in a foreign country, for goodness sake. Once you reach that point, I refuse to believe that you understand your own privilege.
(Notably, a majority of the places mentioned in this novel are neither European nor English speaking — perhaps in an attempt to make it feel ~exotic~ and special, when really it just comes off as aggressively racist any time she encounters anyone who isn’t a native English speaker. And if it’s not that, it’s coming off as an outdated brand of feminism where it’s still cool for women to judge each other like cheap plastic Regina Georges in place of a plot.)
I’m bummed that my first ever NetGalley arc turned out to be as disappointing as it was. I’m usually a fan of essay collections, but this feels unfinished and poorly constructed, and perhaps comes from a perspective that we’ve had more than enough writing from already.
rigs32's review
2.0
I am really torn on this book. I love a good travel memoir. I enjoyed the writing style of each story, but the timeline was all over the place, so I didn't really get a sense of the author's overall growth/journey. Many of the stories didn't do much to introduce the situation or other people involved, so I spent many pages trying to figure out who I was reading about and why. If there was more exposition and/or a more logical order to the stories, my rating would definitely be higher. Note: I did receive a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.