Femme D'Adventure: Travel Tales from Inner Montana to Outer Mongolia

by Jessica Maxwell

Release Date: September, 1997

Edition: Paperback

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Adventure Anywhere

Jessica Maxwell has a knack for finding adventure on her way to the refrigerator. Fortunately for her readers, she chooses to venture further away from home and take us along as we whisk from page to page. Maxwell shows us that adventure is trying something new, whether it's flyfishing in Mongolia or bracing the rapids and fears of whitewater rafting. Her refreshing literary style creates a sense of place that allowed me to tag along to Alaska, Ireland, Italy and elsewhere. Most of all, the book is a fabulous reminder that adventure is in the eye of the adventurer, and to step outside one's comfort level leads to life's richest rewards.

Adventure for Girls

I resented the hell out of this book, and about midway through I realized why. It's not really adventure writing - it's adventure writing *for girls*. Most of these articles would only qualify as fluff or travel pieces, or maybe reflective essays, if they'd been written by men. Because the author is a woman - well, because she's a woman, a trip to Venice qualifies as adventure. A drive in Ireland qualifies as adventure. Fishing in Canada qualifies as adventure. In other words, this is an adventure travel book that only features travel - and fear.

Fear is a necessary component of any adventure article or book, but fear shouldn't own the author and the story; in Femme D'Adventure, it does. Even the introduction, by Lorian Hemingway, talks about how much women have to fear these days, and surely we do, but I *live* the mundane terrors of a woman's daily life - I don't need to read about them in an adventure travel book. From adventure writing, I expect exceptional fear, life-affirming fear, thrilling fear, and this book is sorely lacking in that department. I mean, I was awfully glad to read that the author got over her fear of flying (and, in another article, her fear of rafting). But if I'd wanted to read that kind of story, I'd have bought a self-help book. In an adventure story, I want fear induced not by boarding an airplane but by jumping out of one.

Another irritating aspect of this "adventure for girls" writing is the language. It's cute to the point of inducing nausea. "If the Italian Renaissance painters had been dentists, their dentures would have looked like Venice," the author informs us. Fine. What an adorable sentence that is. Of course, it's also meaningless. And I can't call to mind any other adventure writer OR travel writer who relies so heavily on alliteration. You can only read phrases like "the wicked Wicklow wind," something she repeats more than once in her article on Ireland, so many times before you start reaching for something a little less cute.

Maybe I'd have liked this book a little more if it hadn't been so clearly marketed as adventure writing, right down to the word "adventure" in the title. And then again, considering the language, maybe not. Either way, though, this book mostly serves not to show us, as women, how far we've come, but rather how far we still have to go.