Fumbling

When you write a travel book, you can either (Type A) know up front that you are headed off on a trip where you will write about your adventures, necessitating the having of adventures and/or the elaboration of adventures OR

(Type B) You can set off on a trip, have some amazing adventures, and then talk a publisher into letting you write a book about what happened, though you may have forgotten (i.e., have to make up) many details.

This book strikes me as Type A. Egan decided to take a trip to mourn the death of her father and write a book as she traveled. Nothing much happened. If you cut out all the spliced in essays on pilgrimages and saints and grieving, the book would be about ten pages. I liked this book just fine, but I'd been hoping for a transformational read, and it never felt like that to me. Instead, I kept wanting to shout, “Filler!” every time Egan ventured off the Camino into one tangent or another.