Customer Reviews

Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road (Travelers' Tales Guides)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I picked this book up on a recent trip to San Francisco to read on the plane home to Texas. All I can say is, don't read this book on a plane unless you know the person sitting next to you WELL - it had me laughing hysterically (and loudly). Fortunately, I was sitting with my husband...

The only possible drawback is that it really does deal mostly with things that women can relate to. From explaining a gynecological problem in a foreign language to being the less-than-perfect body on the beach with bikini clad babes, it definitely speaks to the woman traveler. As for me - I could definitely relate. Buy it for your next plane ride!

A cute collection of travel stories by women. I thought it would be funnier than it was. Many of these essays are older and published previously.

A few of the essays stood out (those by Sandra Tsing Loh, Jennifer Leo, Christine Nielse, Sarah Vowell, Christine Michaud, Alison Wright) and others were soon forgotten or difficult to get through (Anne Lamott, Deborah Chaney, E. Jean Carroll, Michele Peterson, Margo Kaufman).

One thing for sure, is that reading these stories makes you want to travel.

These stories are all about women in various traveling situations. I expected more of them to be funny, but hardly any were. Some of them were downright stupid, actually. Quite a few locations were covered, but many of them didn't really give me a good sense of place. I didn't think this was a good book, travel or not.

The title piece in this pocket-sized anthology of humorous travel pieces by women features Christine Nielsen stressing over costumes for a week at Burning Man, a festival "based on creative self-expression." Originating in San Francisco, the event has grown so big it's now held in the Nevada desert where showering is just a means to cake up with a thicker layer of dust and a major highlight is the topless bicycle parade of 4,000 women. I identified more with the sidebar piece by Jennifer L. Leo, describing her coma-stress response to a hearty call for Naked Basketball.

Other pieces focus on more mundane female conundrums like underwear with tired elastic (yikes!) menstrual surprises (even worse!), sanitary facilities, euphemisms in foreign languages, attempting to pass unnoticed in a chador in Kuwait, finding a book in a French airport with a teenager in tow, dealing with the runs, bad hair days in Hong Kong. Ellen Degeneres does a piece on fear of flying and Adair Lara packs for the fantasy person she expects to become halfway around the world. There are men, like Germaine W. Shames' eloquent Mexican lover, though not so many as you might expect in an anthology by women. There may be more pieces on squeezing excess flesh into bathing suits.

Mostly these are good-natured women finding the funny side of mishaps in places as far flung as the red-light district in Bangkok and the 50-pound sack race in small-town Nevada. There are plenty of laughs and - a side benefit - some handy warnings on what not to do when traveling.

Unbelievable. I never thought someone could take such an interesting subject & turn it so awful, but these women did. They went to some of the most interesting places in the world and barely seemed to interact with any locals because they were too busy worrying about their underwear or their hair or whether their butts were too big. The only reason I can figure is that all the pieces were so short (less than 10 pages) that the writers didn't have time to develop anything more interesting. Even writers I usually like, such as Sandra Tsing Loh and Anne Lamott, were dreadful in this book. My disbelief kept me going -- "this can't really be THIS bad, can it?" Yes, it can.

Out of the 28 stories in this book, I found only about 5 to be well-written and humorous. The majority of the rest consisted of stories about intimate bodily fluids and functions that just happened to occur on foreign soil, and frankly, I found them disgusting and boring. After a while, I started skipping stories entirely after reading the first paragraph or two and seeing where they were headed. I was very disappointed.

If you enjoy travel narratives, a much better compilation of women's stories can be found in "A Woman's Passion for Travel" edited by Marybeth Bond & Pamela Michael. Although that book doesn't claim to be a collection of funny stories, "Sand in my Bra" really isn't a collection of funny stories, either.

While a couple of the stories were truly hilarious and well-written, many had the feel of a somewhat humorous email a friend would send after a trip - kind of a had-to-be-there or had-to-know-the-players sense of humor. Some, like the extremely funny excerpt from Ellen Degeneres, were cut short. Overall, it was enjoyable "car-line" reading (15 minutes here and there while waiting for the kids), but not overly engrossing.

I like travel novels but until now have only read them by men. Not anything intentional on my part but I am a little sad to say that I'm a bit disappointed with this first travel book by a woman that I've read. Or I should say women, it's a collection of short stories by several different women.

These short stories range all over the place. Most take place out of the United States in places such as France or Australia in the outback. But there are a few in the US like a Burning Man event out in the desert or some mentions of Montana. And since this book seems to think its about misadventures, the stories usually attempt to be humorous in their tellings and more about little embarrassing stories than travel narratives. There's the lady who is obsessed with poo, another who bartends in Australia, another who details the joy of airline travel and many others.

Each of the stories pretty much has a different writer but I found that their writing styles were all very similar. I don't think its a result of editing but rather that they are all the same type of writer. They try to be humourous and I did enjoy some of the stories they chose to tell better than some of the others, but if asked to pinpoint which author I'm not sure I could tell you which one stood out for me. None of the writing was outstanding though.

I do have to say that this book didn't really satisfy the travel aspect for me. For example, telling a tale about your underwear falling down your legs is not travel writing, even if the event did take place in a foreign country. While I understand that this was supposed to be a book about misadventures, most of these stories were things that could happen in your hometown and still not be very interesting. I really don't care about some guy's junk you saw on a beach and how that 30 second glimpse is the main focus of your short story. There were barely any stories that fascinated me and I really was looking forward to hearing some travel stories from women. But alas they were more concerned about their cellulite and makeup than in having an adventure.

Kind of a sad little book despite its attempts to be funny. At least it was a quick read.

Sand in My Bra
Copyright 2003
194 pages

Review by M. Reynard 2011

This collection includes tales written by women travelling all over the world. They are united in the fact that they are all written by women, and they are all meant to be humorous. I was rather disappointed with the results.

One of the problems is that the excerpts in this collection are all quite short, not long enough to really delve into anything. The second issue was that most of these tales weren't actually very funny. The funniest pieces were those written by known humorists and comedians, like Anne LaMott and Ellen DeGeneres. Others try, but don't succeed. I don't find a blow-by-blow account of Burning Man to be funny, I find it to be pathetic.

Most significantly, though, there seemed to be no good reason for this to be a collection of women's travel writing. This book did not interrogate culturally specific ideas of gender. Instead, there were stories about needing tampons in Paris. It seemed as if the editors of this series had no concept of why there might be a call for a collection of women's travel stories. This anthology is proof positive that simply stamping "women" on something does not create deeper meaning. It is the editor's job to explain the reasoning, and that simply doesn't happen here.

In conclusion, I offer the following quote from the introduction: "If you think about it, how could travel be anything but funny? Especially for women." Indeed.

I found this book just okay, nothing to brag about. Out of all the stories I only chuckled on three of them and that's not many when there's 28 total. Most of them were way too short or just didn't make much sense to me. I didn't feel I traveled anywhere reading them and that's the whole reason I read travel books. Not at all what I expected from this book.