At 26, Agata, already an eager world-traveler, leaves her small hometown in Tuscany to spend a few months in China. Eschewing popular tourist destinations, her first stop is rural Yangshuo, where she stays in a local village, teaching English and learning Chinese at an international school. Next, she journeys to a Buddhist monastery in the Fujian province. She earns her keep by assisting with all of the meal preparations and spends her days learning from the monks and other monastery volunteers from different parts of the world. Agata then must abruptly change pace when she travels to New York City for work obligations. As she adjusts to the frenetic pace of the city, she meets Jack, a DJ about 20 years her senior, with whom she feels a strong but uncertain connection as they explore the city together; she fears their relationship will end after she returns home. When she receives another opportunity to work in New York, Agata accepts, hoping to reconnect with Jack and find the place where she wants to settle. Errante evocatively conveys Agata’s enthusiasm for the places she visits through her admiring attention to detail, both in her descriptions of her surroundings and in her interactions with the strangers she meets; she is appealingly open-minded and appreciative of each new experience. However, the reader doesn’t get a good sense of who Agata is before her journey, so it’s hard to see how much her experiences have changed her at the end. (She was already an avid, experienced traveler at the outset.) The revelations gleaned from her travels often sound clichéd: “China was not just a place to visit but a world to discover, a world that, perhaps, was too big to be understood in a single lifetime.” Finally, the third-person perspective holds the reader at arm’s length—a closer, more intimate portrait of Agata is needed to fully understand how she views the lands she travels through.
