This book was breezily and digestibly written, but was at times excruciating to read. Our narrator is a pathological narcissist who seems to need constant validation and makes overly dramatic mountains out of the molehills of her bourgeois angst. Throughout the books, she tries to play off her grating flakiness as lovable quirk and paints very two-dimensional pictures of the “friends” she makes on her journey, who seem to only exist to validate and encourage our self-absorbed heroine.

I couldn’t help but think the whole time I was reading this book that a month of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would have done infinitely more good for the author than her year of navel-gazing in exotic locales, but then, that doesn’t get you a fat book advance and a spot on Oprah.