Homesickness

The basic story centers on thirteen Australian tourists on a trip around the world. The visit places like Africa and London and New York and all the while the experience bizarre sights and visit strange exhibits (not your normal touristy things) and discover things about themselves as a group and as individuals that leave them focused on a forward journey through life, not necessarily through the world alone. As the group becomes more comfortable with one another they begin to infiltrate each other's lives and the obviousness of their need to escape yet be comforted by the resemblance of home begins to bleed into their trip. But, all of this is purely speculative because Bail doesn't really develop much of anything. He has a bounty of great ideas and a prose that screams promise and yet there is nothing here. There is no weight to these events. Instead, we are presented with a skeletal story. Each new chapter takes us to a new place with a group of people we never get to know nor really care to know. It isn't that they are all unsavory or unlikable (which they are, but that isn't the problem) but that we don't really know enough about them for it to make a difference. There is flirting and hinted backstory and affairs and yet the characters all bleed together to create one lump of a mess and quite frankly, by the time I turned the last page I had no..