Travel Writing Reviews
The Times Literary Supplement Review
"In the hands of a less assured writer, the kinds of metaphysical insight we get in Travel Writing might sometimes be trite."
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Chicago Tribune Review
"...an absolute pleasure to read. It is ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart and poignant. It is also subtly instructive because Peter Ferry No. 1 can't help but teach. It's his nature. And thanks to years of holding the attention of teenagers, he knows how to conceal invaluable lessons in the art of storytelling within a murder mystery wrapped around an exquisitely sensitive novel about the conundrums of love."
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Chicago Tribune Interview
"The book, set along the North Shore, is a dizzying blend of fiction and reality. A handful of real events and people (including narrator Peter Ferry, an English teacher) are mixed in among the fabricated ones."
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Booklist Review
The protagonist in Peter Ferry’s winning first novel is named Peter Ferry. Ferry the novelist teaches high school in a Chicago suburb and writes travel pieces. Ditto his fictional double. As if this isn’t arch enough, Ferry has Peter’s writing students critique the unfolding story. But Ferry’s prose is so entrancing, his mildmannered yet covertly audacious hero is so compelling, there is nothing intrusive or pretentious about this metafiction setup. In fact, it adds to the mystery and charm. It all begins in winter when Peter makes eye contact with an obviously intoxicated woman just before she crashes her car and dies. Peter cannot put this behind him. He learns that her name was Lisa Kim. He goes to her funeral, meets her family and friends, and becomes convinced that her death was no accident. As Peter pursues a clever, if risky, amateur investigation, Ferry interjects Peter’s uproariously funny and shrewdly caustic travel pieces set in Mexico, Thailand, and the wilds of Ontario. In all, a mordantly funny and diabolically smart novel of happenstance and responsibility."
— Donna Seaman
Kirkus Review
Imagination and literal truth collide intriguingly in this Chinese-box puzzle about a man obsessed with a car crash…or is he?
First-time novelist Ferry gives his own versatile professional life, as well as his name, to his protagonist: a high-school teacher in the upscale Chicago suburb of Lake Forest who moonlights as a writer of travel essays. Narrator Pete Ferry’s carefully orchestrated life becomes surreal after he witnesses a traffic accident in which a young woman named Lisa Kim is killed. Or so Pete tells his writing students—a roomful of quick-witted teenagers, each sharply individualized—adding the playful codicil that the incident may not have actually occurred, may instead be an idea intended to challenge their creative powers. What Pete believes gradually emerges from a constantly shifting narrative in which he journeys to various places (Mexico, Thailand, Ontario) for writing assignments, shares his speculations and suspicions with friends and nearly runs aground irreparably with Lydia, who either is or isn’t the woman he loves. Obsessed with the mysterious Lisa Kim, a gifted actress and perhaps also a promiscuous drug addict, Pete attends her funeral, is mistaken for someone close to her and slowly closes in on crucial details about her death. He’d briefly glimpsed another car at the scene of the accident, and he eventually encounters its occupant in a tense denouement that confirms his hunches. Unless, as he reports back to his students, he’s made the whole thing up. This is a witty novel about its own provenance, an exploration of the ambiguous ways in which the writer’s imagination works. Its sly circumlocutions recall Frederick Exley’s classic 1968 anti-novel A Fan’s Notes, and the motions of its perfectly engineered plot raise memories of Humbert Humbert stalking archvillain Clare Quilty in Nabokov’s Lolita. Novel or not-novel, it’s one hell of a fictional debut.
Publishers' Weekly Review
Debut novelist Ferry builds his quietly tricky tale around an English teacher’s amateur investigation into a traffic fatality. Driving home from work, narrator Pete Ferry pulls up beside a car being erratically driven; Pete considers taking action, but before he can, the car crashes into a lamp post, killing Lisa Kim, the young driver. The event haunts Pete, a high school English teacher and occasional travel writer, and he soon neglects his professional duties as he looks into who Lisa was and why she died. Pete is so obsessed with his quarry that he does not notice that his relationship with live-in girlfriend Lydia is failing, though he does turn up leads to Lisa’s heroin connection and a sinister psychiatrist. Or perhaps not: Pete addresses much of his narrative to his English class, and it is not clear whether the reader is meant to believe that the car accident and ensuing intrigues have actually happened, or if Pete has invented them to teach his students a lesson about storytelling. The result is a novel that, for all the cleverness of its construction, is also earnest, engrossing and affecting.
