Femme D'Aventure: Travel Tales From Inner Montana to Outer Mongolia
- Book Review,
by Jessica Maxwell
From Library Journal
In the first chapter, Maxwell (I Don't Know Why I Swallowed the Fly: My Fly Fishing Rookie Season, LJ 4/15/97) states, "There are few accomplishments more gratifying in a woman's life than building her very own relationship with the whole wide world." Written for those who have ventured a bit themselves, this book supports her statement. In each chapter, Maxwell travels to a different place, like "mystical" Ireland, Alaska (to interview a dog "musher" and Iditarod racer), Oregon for steelhead fishing, and Mongolia for salmon fishing. The subject matter is interesting, but Maxwell writes in cliches, and her loose use of grammar detracts. She tends not to delve as deeply as she could into the purpose of her travels and the people and animals she encounters. Yet even with these flaws, Maxwell's world travels will be of interest to many public library patrons.?Melisa Fiumara, North Tonawanda P.L., N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A wryly told, delightful melange of footloose chronicles by a sometimes anxious wanderer. Maxwell (I Don't Know Why I Swallowed the Fly, 1997) is rather like the rest of us: wary of small planes and rushing rivers, yet also fond of wildlife. Unlike some of us, however, she gamely runs Idaho's Salmon River, takes a 37-hour train ride across the Gobi Desert (``insidious grit stormed the failing shell of that old railroad mollusk''), and snorkels among whales. Fly-fishing is Maxwell's raison d'ˆtre, and readers will happily follow her as she searches for steelhead trout on a wild and secret Washington river and fishes a Mongolian waterway reputedly containing the heftiest salmon on earth (up to 200 pounds apiece). One need not be a fellow traveler to appreciate her jaunts; Maxwell's prose is wittily light-hearted. Repulsed by said Mongolian salmon, she declares, ``I'd be damned if I was going to set a world record with a fish that looked so much like Quasimodo in a mermaid suit.'' During an uncharacteristically urban trip to Italy, she comments, ``If the Italian Renaissance painters had been dentists, their dentures would have looked like Venice. Arcaded and cupolaed, welded together with fancy bridgework, riddled with elegant root canals, its yellowed buildings rising straight out of the sea, it looks, for all the world, like a floating grin.'' On her stubbornly eclectic route, Maxwell also journeys to Alaska with sled-dog champion Susan Butcher and her Alaskan huskies. She visits a huge colony of monarch butterflies; she encounters a giant toxic toad. And amid all the double entendres and sardonic asides, this outdoorswoman remains an informative naturalist. Though she'll go to almost any length to muscle out a story, Maxwell writes with refreshingly little machismo. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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