The Lost Girls: Three Friends, Four Continents, One Unconventional Detour Around the World

This is the root of my love-hate relationship with travel books: reading them is like going on a vacation minus the jet lag, but then once they're finished I can't remember a thing about them. Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, with its 109 parts strung like the 109 prayer beads on a Hindu japa mala, was an exception to this rule. Like Eat, Pray, Love, The Lost Girls also left me with the sense that a year spent in the world can be more transformative than, say, acquiring a second home in Europe and making friends with the neighbors, can be. (Not sure if that's an official travel genre but I've read a lot of them.)


Three twenty-something New Yorkers, Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, and Amanda Pressner, wrote The Lost Girls after a year spent traveling around the world together and blogging about it at LostGirlsWorld.com. They hiked the Inca Trail in Peru, volunteered at a girl's school in Kenya, stayed at an ashram in India, and went to surf camp in Australia. But mostly you'll want to keep reading just to root them on, for having courage to give up their jobs, boyfriends and apartments and take a leap into the unknown.

I read this for a book group & I'm bringing ANZAC biscuits (an Australian cookie named after the World War I-era Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) to the meeting, in honor of the ANZAC Day the Lost Girls spent playing two-up with locals in a bar in Sydney. Recipe found here.