Slow Adventures: Enjoy Every Moment: 40 Real-life Journeys by Boat, Bike, Foot, and Train

Carl Honoré is sometimes referred to as the godfather of the Slow Movement. He has written several adult books on mindfulness and the slow movement. It is unclear to me if Slow Adventures: Enjoy Every Moment is intended to be his first book for children or if it is another book for adults in a graphic style. It is a little hard for me to picture young readers imagining themselves sitting on a deck in a white rocking chair sipping lemonade.

Slow Adventures: Enjoy Every Moment was originally published in the United Kingdom under the title It’s the Journey Not the Destination. Both titles are very apt since the book is formatted to present “40 real-life journeys by boat, bike, foot, and train”. The book is divided into four sections, based on those four slow methods of transportation. Each of the four sections begins with a simple world map with the location of the journeys marked by pins and routes shown by line drawings around the edges of the world map. Each of the 40 journeys is presented in a double-page spread. The pages are filled with text and drawings with a different family appearing in the illustrations for each journey. The text includes references to history, geography, culture, plants, and animals, often guiding the reader to be mindful.

The trail ends at the mystical Kalalau Beach. A strip of sand. Emerald-blue water. Green mountains huddled together like bowling pins, their peaks kissed by clouds. As you marvel at the fairy-tale beauty, remember to whisper “Aloha” to the volcanoes that helped create it all. (p31)

The 40 journeys include locations from around the world, most of which will be complicated to get to, even before the ‘adventure’ can begin, with examples being “Salute the Sun on a Chobe River Safari” in Botswana and Namibia, or “Have Your Head in the Clouds on Tren a las Nubes” in Argentina. Clearly the aim of this book is to inspire, not to act as a practical travel guide for children or adults.

If it is author Carl Honoré’s intention to create a book that doesn’t fit neatly into any standard book category, he has done an excellent job. Slow Adventures: Enjoy Every Moment is a large format nonfiction picture book, sized to fit most easily in the primary picture book shelves, but this is not a book intended for very young readers. No pun intended, but it isn’t a good fit.

For older readers, the text contains some intriguing facts, but the information about any one of the journeys is brief, and the illustrations are done in pencil and coloured digitally. They are nice, but the combination seems unlikely to grab the attention of students this age when they are used to information in sound bites and action on the pages.

Perhaps this is the point of this book, but unfortunately, a book that sits on the shelf unopened can’t encourage anyone to do anything fast or slow. A possible audience who may be more receptive to the ‘slow down and enjoy the journey’ message is retirees. Public libraries, retirement homes, doctors’ offices all may want to add Slow Adventures: Enjoy Every Moment to their collections. While I can’t image a young person wanting to read about “sitting on a deck in a white rocking chair, a glass of ice-cold lemonade in hand”, it sounds pretty appealing to me.