Backpack

Rating:
Summary: not what i expected
Review: "Backpack" wasn't what i expected. After reading the back of the book, i expected Tansy to be a Bridget Jones, posh and slightly snobbish londoner, not the wild and crazy party girl with a bad home life. However, that only made the book better.
Backpack turned out to be one of the best books i've read lately. It was very original and full of surprises. I already had high hopes for this book and it exceeded them. I'd reccomend this book to my friends, totally. It was great. I hope that Emily Barr has another novel in the future. Backpack was a great read.

Rating:
Summary: not what i expected
Review: "Backpack" wasn't what i expected. After reading the back of the book, i expected Tansy to be a Bridget Jones, posh and slightly snobbish londoner, not the wild and crazy party girl with a bad home life. However, that only made the book better.
Backpack turned out to be one of the best books i've read lately. It was very original and full of surprises. I already had high hopes for this book and it exceeded them. I'd reccomend this book to my friends, totally. It was great. I hope that Emily Barr has another novel in the future. Backpack was a great read.

Rating:
Summary: this ain't no Bridget Jones
Review: .... and thank God for that! Sometimes I liked Tansy, sometimes she made me sick (what with her unabashed coke habit), but at least she is interesting and does not follow the typical formula that most Brit-chick novels do (though there are lapses.)

Backpack's 28-year-old heroine Tansy is against backpackers and everything they stand for ... their pretentiousness, their "cooler-than-thou" arrogance. She takes umbrage with anyone who calls her bag a "backpack" as she travels throughout Asia.

Tansy's alcoholic mother has died the year before, leaving her with 50,000 pounds and a long-lost older half-brother. She plans a year of traveling in Asia with her boyfriend Tom, who backs out at the last minute (having refunded his tickets months before.)

So Tansy leaves her journalism job (like all the other Brit chicks, she works in either print or broadcast journalism! Quick - someone hold a career fair in London so we can read about someone in another job!)

She arrives alone in Asia and starts meeting people, especially Max, to whom at first glance she would never have spoken. She starts to confront her feelings about her mother. There is also a murderer who is traveling through different countries on her itinerary, murdering British blonde women, much like herself. And Tom inconveniently decides to holiday with her in Thailand.

This is a good book for anyone who can't get away to travel for a year and find themselves -- it's the next best thing to read about Tansy's inner journey.

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: An excellent read. This story keeps you thinking with entertaining characters and an interesting plot line. I can't wait to read more of Barr's work.

Rating:
Summary: Good read
Review: As another reviewer said, this isn't the typical chick book. I liked the twist at the end. I didn't see it coming. I didn't really get a sense of all of the places Tansy went to. I was more interested in her love debacle.

Rating:
Summary: Two, Two, Two Novels in One! OR Maybe Even Three...
Review: Backpack by Emily Barr wants to be a an insightful character study of a bright young Londoner who represses the effects of her pain-filled youth. It also wants to be a murder mystery, and quite possibly has aspirations of being a hip travelogue. Anyone of these would have worked, but the resulting hodgepodge of genres results in many underdeveloped characters and subplots. The murderer is obvious, as is the romance.
However, parts of this book are very funny, especially before Tansy becomes a kinder, gentler person. If you are stuck in an airport, reading this book is better than staring at the TV screen, but otherwise, you have better things to do with your time.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging and interesting
Review: Backpack is a nice change of pace from the dearth of British single girl fiction. While the protagonist, Tansy, is newly single, instead of moping around London she heads to Asia.

To say Tansy is unprepared to travel for a year and that she endures culture shock, is an understatement. Who else would pack designer clothes, including white linen, in a backpack. By the end of her first day, many finger marks from children beggars are all over the bottom of her shirt. Reluctantly, she buys more practical clothes -- including tye-dye t-shirts. These t-shirts are like those worn by the backpackers that she tries not to associate herself with "I'm a traveller, not a backpacker." Even as Tansy starts spending more and more time with backpackers, and continually growing to feel like genuine friends with them, she is still hesitant to label herself as one. Regardless of this, the more she travels the more her personality and outlook are effected.

Barr does a very good job of showing how immersion in a foreign culture, with or without travel partners, will alter your outlook on life. While the location descriptions aren't always very distinct or tangible, the reader is provided with a reasonably good sense of Tansy's location. It was my impression that this story could have been set anywhere where Tansy didn't know the local language. But that just reinforces the idea that this is Tansy's story, with Asia as a backdrop instead of Asia as a central point to the story. Where other single Brit girl books have their protagonists swilling chardonnay and eating milk trays, Tansy is drinking Dragon beer and worrying about ordering vegetarian food properly.

The murder mystery angle is interesting and, at times, provides more pull to the overall storyline than Tansy's 'what will I do about my boyfriend back home' and 'what will I do about my lover here' frequent musings. And this storyline also nicely ties together Tansy's friends and family back home, and provides a strong undercurrent amongst Tansy and her travelling companions.

All in all, this is a solid first novel and I will be interested to read Barr's next novel. In taking a familiar theme and character-type and dumping them in Asia, Barr has nicely drawn a parallel between the shock of the loss of a romantic partner and the shock and bewilderment you feel when you're suddenly immersed in a culture you know little about. It is the setting of Asia that makes this novel refreshingly stand out from its genre.

Rating:
Summary: Well Done
Review: Backpack is a very well-done and funny novel which is a bit of a departure from the chick lit novels we all know and love. For starters, the opening chapter has the heroine, Tansy, waking up in a hospital bed after having her stomach pumped on the day of her alcoholic mother's funeral. The rest of the novel is like that, a bit more gritty and real than your standard romantic comedy. Tansy's life in London, including her relationship with her boyfriend, begins to come apart and to escape it all, she travels to Asia, where she initially rejects the term "backpacker" although, that is what she is. Her experiences are very evocative of traveling, as a twenty-somthing, in a third world nation. The novel is funny and adds a bit of suspense with a murder mystery subplot that wasn't entirely necessary. Tansy--who began the novel as an annoying, coke addicted witch--grows up in a believable way as the novel progresses. Backpack makes for fun, breezy, enjoyable reading.

Rating:
Summary: Well Done
Review: Backpack is a very well-done and funny novel which is a bit of a departure from the chick lit novels we all know and love. For starters, the opening chapter has the heroine, Tansy, waking up in a hospital bed after having her stomach pumped on the day of her alcoholic mother's funeral. The rest of the novel is like that, a bit more gritty and real than your standard romantic comedy. Tansy's life in London, including her relationship with her boyfriend, begins to come apart and to escape it all, she travels to Asia, where she initially rejects the term "backpacker" although, that is what she is. Her experiences are very evocative of traveling, as a twenty-somthing, in a third world nation. The novel is funny and adds a bit of suspense with a murder mystery subplot that wasn't entirely necessary. Tansy--who began the novel as an annoying, coke addicted witch--grows up in a believable way as the novel progresses. Backpack makes for fun, breezy, enjoyable reading.

Rating:
Summary: whiny cokehead makes good (reading)
Review: Backpack is marketed as a comic novel in the Britchick genre, but it's much more a book of self-discovery. It details the misadventures of Tansy, a party girl whose horrifying alcoholic mother has recently died from one drink too many, as she goes alone a year-long trip to Asia that was supposed to happen with her on/off boyfriend. She begins as an extremely whiny and unlikeable character, full of bad attitude, with an idea of how fashionably zen her trip will make her appear to others. Once on the road, however, she begins to lose her bad attitude and open up to the things she sees and the new friends she makes: notably, a kind Australian "little people" couple, Ally and Andy, and a fellow Brit, backpacker Max, with whom Tansy begins a relationship that quickly becomes more serious than she expected. With their support - and perspective gained from being far away from her London lifestyle and partying friends - she begins to become a better and more interesting person, and to explore the effects of her mother's death. There is a murder mystery subplot in this book, and I don't think it's entirely successful - the last few chapters are poorly-written in comparison to what has come before (and in a general sense - the killer's dialogue is laughably bad), and the end is anticlimactic, which is why I've given it only four stars. This is not a light book, but it is an interesting take on how a young woman learns to balance her life and come into her own while she is a long way away from what had been an unhealthy home.