This is both a travel and personal journey memoir, giving little snippets of the authors life and the cultures experienced. It also highlights the vulnerability of a lone female traveler and the common sense needed (almost all the time). The book was both laugh out loud at times as well as very serious, which was entertaining and enjoyable.
Received from NetGalley in return for an unbiased review.

Suzanne Roberts's descriptions of places in each story truly were beautiful and poetic, transporting me to them right there, not to mention I myself visited some of them and can testify to the veracity of her words! The book itself was also an intimate portrait of her exploration of her self-worth and self-esteem. Pity then that the stories were scattered all over and organized for the topics in a Lonely Planet guide-book way, instead of going for a linear progression. I have to note though that I was reading the ARC of the book (huge thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher!), so I am not sure if that remained so in the final edition of the book. It was a pity, because it would be otherwise a perfect read for everyone, especially for women who are in need to acknowledge their worth and their faults, not necessarily while on tour around the world (but it is not bad idea too). I was so absorbed in her search for true happiness that the waste of time trying to connect the dots how is someone connected to her in which stories annoyed me a lot. I do wonder if I would have been as transfixed if the stories were indeed in the straight order, but it's pointless. As it was, it did diminish the experience.

I would give this book 4.5 stars if it was possible, and recommend it to all my girls who love stories about travel and who are not afraid of reading a bit of truth about themselves in them. Some choices Suzanne made were in my opinion odd (and she admitted them so freely), but they do not make her worth any lesser. On the contrary, the fact she got over and shared her sorrows and regrets in these stories make her a beautiful huggable human being whom is impossible to dislike and not want to be a friend with.

Overall I did enjoy this book. I liked the individual stories, but I think two things could have improved the book. I understand it was thematic rather than chronological, but I had difficulty keeping track of when the author was married (and to whom) or who she was dating which was often referenced in the stories. Additionally, I would have loved some background info on the author and how/when she started traveling. I was looking for there to be more of an introduction to who she is (and how all the traveling related to her teaching).

Didn't particularly enjoy this one. Too much focus on her personal life vs travel. I also found it a bit chaotic to read at times. It just wasn't a great book for me.

this was a great memoir, the stories were great and I enjoyed going on this journey. I look forward to more from the author.

as a diplomat and avid traveler, I had a great time reading this book. I could very easily identify with the struggles and faux pas Roberts encountered while traveling.

I am really torn on this book. I love a good travel memoir. I enjoyed the writing style of each story, but the timeline was all over the place, so I didn't really get a sense of the author's overall growth/journey. Many of the stories didn't do much to introduce the situation or other people involved, so I spent many pages trying to figure out who I was reading about and why. If there was more exposition and/or a more logical order to the stories, my rating would definitely be higher. Note: I did receive a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This is not your grandmothers travel memoir. Full of sex, booze, and far flung adventures; it's like getting snippets of soap operas. Bad Tourist was a highly enjoyable read. I laughed. I cringed. I wanted to hear more. I really hope this gets made into an audiobook read by the author.

Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel is a collection of travel essays from Suzanne Roberts’s travels around the world loosely collected around the idea of “peccadillos--the seeming harmless things we do in another culture that we would never do in our own--that make us bad tourists.” (Her words!)

And although many of the stories are funny and there are a few that might make you cringe, it’s more than just a collection of stories from one woman’s self-centered crazy adventures as other books in this genre sometimes become--there’s heart and meaning behind many of the stories with thoughts and lessons of how travel can affect our lives...and the lives of the people we meet along the way.

I wrote down more than just a few quotes from the book as I wanted to revisit them; I was often grateful that she was able to put into words experiences or thoughts that I, too, have experienced while traveling (or just plain living life; she does include some experiences with relationships, too).

My one complaint is the organization of the book--the stories were sorted by activity (“Eating and Drinking,” “Activities,” etc.) which meant stories from the same trip were sometimes separated and the stories sometimes jumped in time. There wasn’t one summarizing introduction or epilogue to tie the stories together; but, I read an Advanced Readers Copy and I hope that’s something they’ve added to the published editions.

Overall, though, it’s a great choice for anyone who loves to travel and realizes that travel can teach us a few things about ourselves and our world.

There’s nothing better than to read a travel book when you’re stuck at home and can’t travel. I thought Bad Tourist was an enjoyable and quick read taking the reader through many travel mishaps and adventures that most travelers can relate to. I felt that the book could have been written chronologically as I found it difficult to navigate and remember things that previously happened. Overall, a funny, easy book to keep the wanderlust going.

Thank you to Suzanne Roberts, University of Kansas Press, and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

** spoiler alert ** Oh how I wanted to like this book. The description makes you believe it’s going to be about the author’s travels....it’s not. It’s about her hooking up with random guys and making stupid decisions on various trips she’s taken. There are one or two decent stories purely travel related (the story of the Scottish gentleman picking them up was very heartwarming), but this more the non-linear ramblings of a woman who is drunk most of the time and can’t figure out what she wants.

The first 44% of this book was stories of her having one night stands in various destinations in the Caribbean and Central/South America and Mexico. It was hard to keep track of what was what because the stories kept jumping: first it’s 2007 and she’s been married for 6 months, then it’s 2017 and she’s divorced, then it’s 2011 and she’s hooking up with her husband’s friend, it’s all over the place.

And bad decisions? Remind me to never go anywhere with her. Leaves her drink unattended in a Peruvian bar-gets ruffied. Looses track of her friend in a disco in Mexico and assumes she’ll be fine- friend returns as the bus is leaving the next morning. Opens a bottle of water, notices there is no “snap” of a seal but drinks it anyway and becomes dangerously sick, and time and again hooks up with strangers and brings them into the hotel room she shares with friends. And mixes bleach and ammonia. Either she is really that stupid and naive, or she has woven one heck of a series of tales to sell a book.

The author was named best new travel writer by National Geographic. Well. Her writing isn’t bad, I’ll give her that.

I hate being critical of writers, but this book is not how it is advertised, and I did not enjoy it at all. The only saving grace was it only took about 3 hours to finish.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review.

This book was NOT what I expected at all. Instead of the a book full of adventures she experienced traveling, I got a book of adventures and a collection of one-night-stands in almost every single story that's in this book.

Not only was this book not what I expected, but the author seemed to constantly put herself into unsafe situations that leads to her being drugged by a tainted drink while she was in Peru, someone she was with was drugged in Mexico, and she seemed to constantly need to try to escape men she drunkenly slept with and then regretted the next morning. And clearly she doesn't learn from these mistakes as this happens over and over again to her.

Sorry, but I don't find that to be entertaining. And if it weren't for the fact that this was an ARC, I would have DNFed this book at about 20%.

I picked up Suzanne Roberts's Bad Tourist thinking that it was a book about travel. Within the first twenty pages I realized the description of the book is very misleading – the focus of the book is not really travel at all. It's really about the authors personal life and the one night stands and brief relationships she has all over the world.

The structure of the book is incredibly disjointed. It's a series of vignettes that reads like sketchily written journal entries. And because the "stories" are all told out of order, it's very difficult to keep track of the timeline of the author's life and who the other people in each story are. Also, there's no prologue, nothing that tells the reader any information about who the writer is or what sort of book this is.

Lastly, the author is so privileged and doesn't seem to learn anything at all, making the same mistakes over and over and over again. The only thing that changes are the countries.

Thank you to the author, University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book of so-called travel essays did not go down well with me. I didn't care for the self-indulgent tone of a woman who continuously and consciously makes bad choices that put her in harm's way, spends way too much time agonizing about her current and past bed/life partners and does it all from a position of privilege that she seems completely unaware of. The amazing and diverse countries and cultures she visits seem to make little or no impact on her - but then I can only judge by what she has chosen to share in her writing. The editing is erratic at best, and does the writer no favors. All in all, I was glad to have this done with and would not recommend.

this is probably one of my favourite kind of books, particularly now when one cannot travel as we once did. Such escapism.

Sadly, I have absolutely nothing positive to say about this book. White middle-class woman navel-gazing as she fails to understand her privilege to travel the world making judgements about people and places that are mean and ill-considered. This was bad.

God do I hate it when white women try to be deep about world travel.

Suzanne Roberts’ new novel, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel sounds promising when you read its summary: the novel “takes [readers] across four continents to fifteen countries, showing [them] what not to do when traveling.” It sounds like any other armchair travel book - lush descriptions of exotic locales, fascinating stories about wildlife and culture and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. It came off alluringly enough that I picked up a digital ARC without a second thought...and turned out to be massively disappointed.

From page one, it’s difficult to escape the clearly well-off position Roberts is writing this book from. Sure, she says she’s not wealthy - not enough to afford Louis Vuitton luggage, as she notes in her Vegas anecdote - but to travel as extensively as she does speaks of a kind of luxury only afforded to a small percentage of people. Most people, even single women, don’t get the opportunity to travel outside the country even once in their lives, and that fact presses hard on the entire thesis of this book. Life lessons learned in India or Greece or Mexico are difficult to sympathize with when most people’s idea of a vacation involves Disney World at best, and usually with their entire family rather than solo. Roberts traveling and the frivolous choices she makes on her way posit an upper middle class vision of the world without leaving a foot in the door for everyone else to get in, and thus leaves a bad taste in the readers’ mouth before they’ve even gotten to the main course.

And I say this as someone who’s done extensive traveling. Living in and exploring the places I’ve been in Europe has helped me find myself, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have money, or that my study abroad program wasn’t entirely tuition-funded. And going to Europe doesn’t make me qualified to talk about deep universal truths like Roberts feels going to Panama has -I just know that because I have ADHD, my brain does better in a stimulating city environment, and that’s a good enough truth for me. The six months I lived in London certainly aren’t enough to make a book out of.

And yet, I’m fairly certain that the time I saw a guy dressed as Freddie Mercury in drag on the Tube was a more enriching cultural experience than the entirety of this book.

Roberts sections Bad Tourist into short highlights from various locations, each with a different story. I appreciated the brevity that kept me moving through the book, but each snippet of a story
was too short to really glean any kind of moral lesson or understanding from, and the writing comes off as a shallow imitation of better travelogues by hitting the same basic “I am a privileged white lady who is learning about my privilege from the horrors of the non-Western world” beats as every travel novel I’ve ever read. The stories are out of order chronologically and follow no real organized form, and Roberts doesn’t even go so far as to explain how these events affected her life as a whole — they just play out like pieces of a film left on the cutting room floor, entirely alone and without the context needed to understand them properly.

Even the anecdotes themselves feel out of order and shoddily spliced together. Roberts will start to tell one tale, then jump back days or weeks earlier in the same trip to give important background that she really could’ve just started out with. It feels messy, not dissimilar to notes jotted down on a phone’s notes app and never sent through a proper editing process. I zoned out and skimmed paragraphs on more than one occasion and didn’t feel like I was missing a single thing.

And I’m sorry, ma’am, but admitting to cheating on your husband in the first quarter of the book isn’t going to help your already poor case, guilty feelings or not.

For a travel memoir, perhaps a good seventy percent of this book focuses on Roberts’ love life. And while it does come with the package as part of the subtitle, the amount of time she spends bemoaning her relationship status and her endless string of foreign one-night stands overwhelms most of the travel aspects of the overall story, enough to make me regret starting it in the first place.

I fully, truly do not care about your cavalcade of boyfriends, Suzanne Roberts. They all seem exactly the same — depthless, annoying caricatures meant to make you look good in hindsight — and after the fourth nearly-identical story with the names switched out, I almost didn’t finish Bad Tourist entirely. You say, “I defined myself through the male gaze”, as if it’s some earth-shattering revelation, and not something that every woman has to learn to unsee themselves through as part of growing up. There’s no need to detail the sordid, gross details of a bunch of one night stands in order to get that across, particularly not in a book supposedly about travel. You talk of not wanting to harp on self-flagellation, and yet that’s exactly what rolls off your writing in waves — by repeating the same anecdotes over and over again,you make your self-shaming public in order to feel some amount of gratitude for yourself, or perhaps a justification for not having any self-confidence.

(As someone with anxiety, I understand that struggle, but at least I try to tamp down my victim complex because of it.)

Additionally, I can’t help but cringe at Roberts’ descriptions of the environments she’s found herself in throughout her life, though she claims to understand that she comes from a place of privilege. Her visuals of the locals she encounters in each of the fifteen countries are no more than paper cutouts, flimsy stereotypes of poverty and exoticism that play up every racist idea ever held by western society - from pickpockets in Central America and beggars in India to alluring men in Greece who speak little to no English. The adults don’t speak English, all of the children are criminals or sex workers, and not one honest portrayal of a non-white individual is offered in the entire book.

This is a woman who argued the price of a French manicure in a foreign country, for goodness sake. Once you reach that point, I refuse to believe that you understand your own privilege.

(Notably, a majority of the places mentioned in this novel are neither European nor English speaking — perhaps in an attempt to make it feel ~exotic~ and special, when really it just comes off as aggressively racist any time she encounters anyone who isn’t a native English speaker. And if it’s not that, it’s coming off as an outdated brand of feminism where it’s still cool for women to judge each other like cheap plastic Regina Georges in place of a plot.)

I’m bummed that my first ever NetGalley arc turned out to be as disappointing as it was. I’m usually a fan of essay collections, but this feels unfinished and poorly constructed, and perhaps comes from a perspective that we’ve had more than enough writing from already.

I liked the idea of this memoir, I feel as though the timeline and little stories jumped around too much and I found myself questioning what sequential order everything was happening in

Bad Tourist is a good although sometimes cringe-worthy read! Definitely a departure from the typical romantic travel memoirs!

who knew I loved anthologies? I love books formatted like this where each story is set in a completely different setting or with a completely different plot but they all fit together into a larger story. This book follows Suzanne Roberts through her travel adventurous and trials.

I was expecting this book to be super lighthearted and funny, and while there were definitely funny moments, it was more of a book exploring her own identity and also grappling with some of the darker sides of travelling (especially travelling alone as a woman). She gave incredibly honest accounts of her interactions with locals, with other tourists, and with cultures very different from her own. She was open about her feelings about foreign traditions, while also trying to be as open-minded and respectful as possible.

I loved how you could totally see her growth in every chapter, especially in how she deals with men. It's very rare that character development is so obvious in nonfiction so it was lovely to see.