Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful witty writing by an author who shows great promise
Review: This book about a young woman's travels around the world to find the perfect spa is just the right thing to curl up with on a snowy weekend afternoon. The author serves up a delicious mix of eccentric characters, quirky encounters and fascinating history. The pages turn and you learn a lot without even knowing it! That's the perfect kind of nonfiction book, in my opinion. It's also inspired me to go visit a bath at the first possible opportunity.
Rating:
Summary: Even Better Than a Bath
Review: This book's even better than a bath.
Brue is a wonderful writer, but far beyond that, she's a wonderful story-teller.
The quest for the perfect bath forms the plot line, but the quest makes a far richer tale than any particular bath.
Even for those of us in quest of nothing more than a daily shower, this makes for wonderful reading, as Brue is witty, insightful, and above all humorous.
While she acts humble as a stranger in strange lands pursuing a strange interest, she shouldn't be humble as a story-teller. She's gifted in taking a specialized field and making it lively, even delightful, to anyone who loves human nature and passions.
I'd recommend it strongly -- and have to loads of people.
Rating: 
Summary: A vicarious vacation
Review: This is a great book for those who enjoyed the old days of The New Yorker magazine when articles ran long and mixed exotic information with personal disclosure. The book mixes travelogue with a touch of memoir. The travelogue (a la Bill Bryson) is quite interesting and chock a block with details. The memoir of her failing relationship with her boyfriend and her implied hookups with other exotic gents around the world is tantalizing, although she doesn't go deep on it.
Rating:
Summary: A Bather's Baedeker
Review: This is a thoroughly delightful, often amusing, account of Alexia's search for the perfect bath. Once started, the book is difficult to put down; by the end, you not only know a bit more about her 'on hold' relationship with Charles, and want to know even more about her fascinating putative business partner Marina, but you have painlessly absorbed as much information as you could want to know about the differing characteristics of a variety of national public baths. Along the way, you will also have met a number of characters who are not easy to forget, and you will have a guide to which baths to use and which to avoid-of not inconsiderable benefit to one visiting Turkey who, like Alexia, is warned to avoid the 'unhygienic' baths in Istanbul. The evocative line drawings by Lynda Reeves McIntyre which appear at the head of each chapter fittingly complement the book.
Rating:
Summary: A new breed of Travel Writing
Review: What a disappointmet! What I was hoping would be a useful tourbook full of interesting facts about world bathing cultures and history turned out to be a lurid expose of Brue's downward moral spiral -- her characters would be mortified to read passages that recount how she was "not supposed to tell", how she rationalizes her infidelity (poor, poor Charles -- let's hope you stopped paying the bills and rent and moved out). Her superior attitude is unearned and unwarranted -- what gives this 27-year-old the right to lord herself over those with more experience and aptitude? Another reviewer compared Brue's writing to Bill Bryson. I have news for you -- Bryson has a sense of wit and humor as he vivisects cultural (and human) anomalies. Brue is just plain cruel and mean -- where's the fun in that (for the reader). Shame on the editorial staff at Bloomsbury for buying into a good concept (it was a good concept) and letting it go to seed. Brue's experiences are best left to the diary. Instead of elevating bathing studies into the pop limelight, she sends it to the red-light district where she is infinitely more comfortable. And the net result -- she, her readers, and her contacts all suffer from bad research and bad writing in this self-serving piece of trash best left on the beach, buried and unread.
Rating: 
Summary: Tourist Tramp
Review: What a disappointmet! What I was hoping would be a useful tourbook full of interesting facts about world bathing cultures and history turned out to be a lurid expose of Brue's downward moral spiral -- her characters would be mortified to read passages that recount how she was "not supposed to tell", how she rationalizes her infidelity (poor, poor Charles -- let's hope you stopped paying the bills and rent and moved out). Her superior attitude is unearned and unwarranted -- what gives this 27-year-old the right to lord herself over those with more experience and aptitude? Another reviewer compared Brue's writing to Bill Bryson. I have news for you -- Bryson has a sense of wit and humor as he vivisects cultural (and human) anomalies. Brue is just plain cruel and mean -- where's the fun in that (for the reader). Shame on the editorial staff at Bloomsbury for buying into a good concept (it was a good concept) and letting it go to seed. Brue's experiences are best left to the diary. Instead of elevating bathing studies into the pop limelight, she sends it to the red-light district where she is infinitely more comfortable. And the net result -- she, her readers, and her contacts all suffer from bad research and bad writing in this self-serving piece of trash best left on the beach, buried and unread.
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