The Lost Girls by Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett & Amanda Pressner Review: A Spirited but Uneven Travel Memoir

The Lost Girls is a group travel memoir written by three friends who, on the brink of what they describe as a quarter-life crisis, made a collective pact to abandon the high-pressure New York City media world. Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett, and Amanda Pressner — all journalists by trade — quit their jobs and spent a year backpacking 60,000 miles across four continents. The itinerary is genuinely ambitious: Brazil, Peru, Kenya, India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, and Panama all figure in the journey. The book is structured so that each author takes turns narrating by chapter, giving readers three distinct voices and three distinct interior lives across a shared adventure. The central question driving the memoir is less about geography than identity: what do ambitious women in their late twenties actually want, and what happens when they stop long enough to find out?

Travel memoirs about women seeking reinvention occupy a well-populated shelf, but The Lost Girls distinguishes itself through its explicitly collective format. This is not one woman's solo journey of self-discovery but a story of three friends navigating the same road — sometimes in harmony, sometimes not. Critics noted that "though they don't always get along, the three learn to rely on each other, keep their minds open and throw themselves enthusiastically after every adventure." That relational dimension gives the memoir a social texture that solo-narrator travelogues cannot replicate. All three authors brought professional journalism credentials to the project — Corbett held editorial positions at Self and Woman's Day, Pressner has contributed to USA Today, Cosmopolitan, and Shape, and Baggett went on to work at the Food Network — which shapes both the book's fluency and its occasionally reportorial distance from raw emotion.

critical coverage, reviewing the memoir ahead of its May 2010 publication, offered a notably warm assessment, describing the three authors as "gifted writers" whose "passionate, vivid descriptions of their far-flung travels, bolstered by thoughtful insights and genuine intentions," make the book "an intensely enjoyable read for fans of travel writing." The review also highlighted the memoir's semi-improvisatory travel style as giving it a broader perspective than either a packaged luxury tour or a stripped-down backpacking trip would afford. For readers in their twenties uncertain about their own futures, critical coverage found the book "immediately relatable." The memoir also draws a blurb from novelist Allison Winn Scotch, a New York Times bestselling author, who called it "a triumphant journey about losing yourself, finding yourself and coming home again."

Kirkus Reviews delivered a more cautious verdict. The chapter-by-chapter rotation of narrators, while structurally inventive, initially creates confusion — readers must recalibrate with each shift in voice. More pointedly, Kirkus argued that the opening Latin American section of the trip reads closer to a college spring-break excursion than a soul-searching venture, and that even as the writing finds its footing, the underlying narrative never gathers sufficient emotional force. The critique extends to the memoir's treatment of genuinely weighty material: Kirkus observed that experiences such as volunteering in Kenya, adjusting to conditions of abject poverty, and navigating unfamiliar languages and social conventions "never take on the profound, moving quality readers may expect." In Kirkus's assessment, the authors "learned a lot about themselves and the world during their year abroad, but they are unable to convey it in a compelling manner." The book's closing line — "the only leaps of faith you'll ever regret are the ones you don't take" — was flagged by Kirkus as a platitude, a sign that the memoir's emotional resolution leans on sentiment rather than hard-won insight.

The Lost Girls is most likely to resonate with readers already drawn to the travel-writing genre and with anyone who has stood at a professional or personal crossroads in their twenties. The three-narrator format rewards patience: Kirkus acknowledged that the book "finds its stride as a writing team" as the journey progresses, and the global scope of the itinerary — eleven countries across four continents — ensures consistent variety of setting. Readers seeking a deeply introspective or literary meditation on place and identity may find the book lighter than they hoped. Those looking for an energetic, companionable account of friendship tested by long-term travel, written by three journalists who clearly know how to hold a reader's attention scene by scene, will find more to enjoy. The memoir sits comfortably in the tradition of women's travel writing while adding a genuinely uncommon group-narrative structure to that tradition.