"With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching sixteen-year-old Gore makes her way from the sterile suffocation of Silicon Valley through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders bustling, electric Kathmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole. Yet it is in the calm, verdant landscape of rural Italy where her adventure truly begins."

This was GREAT! Unlike most travel books this one was a book about travel and life. Gore leaves home young and comes home mentally years older and a mother. I love the travel book genre and I love memoirs and this was the right combination of both. And she doesn't write with self-pity, it's just 'this is what happened to me, here it is'. And there was a great quote in one chapter, I can't remember it word for word, but a woman tells her 'everyone's tragic story is unique to them, and no one's is any worse than the next person's'.

Sent this to sweetsangria.

I have wanted to read this book for a long time. I love the cover, and the author lives here in Portland, oregon. Thank you tuff517!

This was an interesting memoir. I thought it was crazy that she was traveling around the world alone at 16.

"But maybe words were never meant to be scattered like wildflower seeds on asphalt, wasted. Maybe words were precious,dangerous, delicate. Maybe I could make patterns out of the scraps and sentence fragments of my life."

RELEASE NOTES:

sent to marthaminx as an RABCK. It needed to be passed on.

Thank you, sweetsangria! I received this the other week, but forgot to journal due to the hectic life of a mama with a 6 month year old. I'm looking forward to reading this one (...maybe if he ever takes a nap!) ;)

Thanks for passing it along, ladies...I'll do the same!