Book Review: Joy Hunter by Alexis Jones
I picked this book up from the library because it seemed, at first glance, to be about a rejuvenating road trip in an RV, and I like travel stories. Then, when I read the author blurb on the inside back cover, I almost gave up on it before I started. It says that “Alexis Jones is an internationally recognized speaker, media personality, activist, and author.” It goes on to delineate the awards she has received, the famous people lists she’s been on, the appearances she’s made (including at the White House, United Nations, Harvard, Stanford, West Point, and on and on), her world travels, and her stint as a contestant on the TV show Survivor. I usually avoid books by celebrities. They offer advice from a position of power and wealth, and thus have little to say of practical value to us common folk. Still, I decided to try ten or twenty pages of Joy Hunter before I cast it aside, and I ended up reading the whole thing.
Jones is writing from a position of power and relative wealth, and I couldn’t help but be aware of that as I read her story. Merely to rent an RV, take off for a month and then more, and stay in fully-equipped RV camps, is something I dream of but cannot afford. And there’s the fact that Jones seems to have close friends everywhere; it seems that just about every town they travel through she’s visiting another intimate associate. I couldn’t relate to that at all. Most of the closest friends I have known have died, and sometimes I feel quite alone in the world. When I think about it, though, when I was hitchhiking around the world back in the 1970s I did meet a lot of people, and eventually I was able to stop here and there along the way for fellowship and refreshment. Still… Jones’s position of privilege has to be taken for granted as you read, almost as if this were a fantasy tale of a noble princess.
As for the road trip, it takes up a fairly small portion of the book at the end. What Jones mainly writes about are the personal traumas that led her to embark upon the road trip, including a miscarriage after she and her husband had tried so hard to have a child, and the discovery that the man who had raised her and she had always considered her dad was not her flesh father. The road trip is a last-ditch attempt to improve her emotional well-being, and this proves to be a resounding success.
What rescues this book from becoming a maudlin soap opera is Jones’s writing skill. She really is a very good writer, and she weaves together the multitudinous flashbacks and reminiscences that lead up to the road trip with skill and acumen. And the lessons she imparts on self-love and joy-seeking really are relevant to everyone, even those of us who do not have vast networks of friends and associates and cannot afford to rent RVs or take weeks off work. After all, even if we are not all princesses and princes, we enjoy stories about fantasy lands and long to live happily ever after.
In conclusion, I recommend this book. Even if most readers may not be able to relate to the privilege and power of the author, it tugs on the emotional heartstrings, and there are lessons to be learned from it.
