By Steven Barker
Senior Staff Writer
Pros:
-Casual writing style
-Enjoyable experiences worth reading
-Easily relatable to our own life
Cons:
-Unnecessary details slow the narrative
-Too long given the pedestrian theme
-Distracting spelling, grammar errors
What should we prioritize after graduating from college: Finding a career or seeking one last thrill?
For some, the answer can be found in conventional wisdom; get a career, start saving money and wait for your eventual two-week vacation. For Evan Kenward, however, the answer is clear; take a road trip. Go out and live.
Beginning with his graduation from Amherst College, Kenward’s self-published novel “Young Wanderlust” chronicles then-21 Kenward’s 28-day-journey across the United States in the summer of 2008.
Setting out from Massachusetts in an old Subaru with Wallace, the complaining driver, and Gill, his ever-composed friend, Kenward begins his trek from Massachusetts with a stop in Petoskey, Mich to spend a day with a friend he met while studying abroad. Soon afterward, he camps out in the Badlands of South Dakota and details brief stay in Jackson, Wyo, among other stops, before finally reaching California.
Despite the joy in arriving in San Francisco, the future of the road trip is threatened when Kenward and company discover that Wallace’s Subaru needs significant repairs and will be unable to continue the journey. Faced with the option of either returning home – something Wallace and Gill both elect to do – or continuing the journey, Kenward chooses the latter. Thanks to both a chance meeting with a gracious host while on a bus in Oregon and others that willingly provide him with a place to stay, Kenward is able to journey into Seattle and British Columbia before eventually returning home.
Above all else, Kenward’s novel implores the reader to experience the manifold beauties of life before we’re entrapped by vocational and familial obligations. In different instances, traveling abroad is described by two different hosts as an “experience” so grand, so enormous that “you can do it for your entire life without retracing your steps.” In this regard, Kenward’s travels are not merely a record of his own experiences – rather, they’re a testimony to the selfsame freedom, wonder and satisfaction you could experience should you gather the courage and travel the world.
The novel is not without fault, however. On numerous occasions, the narrative of the journey is bogged down by excessive, sometimes irrelevant details: the meals he ate along the way, some jokes that are indefensibly corny and factoids that do not meaningfully contribute to the experience as a whole. As a result, what could have been a leaner, more readable 300-page novel instead becomes a bloated, sometimes tangential 470-page novel that, even for the most devoted of readers, might pose a problem.
As such, whether you should buy the novel ultimately depends on your individual needs as a reader. If you are a reader who is daunted by the idea of reading a 470-page novel or cannot palate occasional tangents and detours in the narrative – or are uninterested in reading about the life of someone who is neither rich nor famous – you can safely avoid “Young Wanderlust.” If, however, you find yourself in the midst of an experiential crisis, where you yearn for more than the daily routines and experiences of the classroom or cubicle, Kenward’s invitation into the joys of traveling will prove both entertaining and invigorating.
Rating: 3/5
