Bookpage Review
From the June 2003 issue (page 17)

Wendy Dale’s Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger (Three Rivers) will satisfy your schadenfreude (that’s the German word for delight in the misery of others). This is a wonderful book — not a subversive treatise on rule-breaking as the title might suggest, but a witty, insightful memoir of a young woman from an offbeat, though well-traveled family. Her own atypical travel sense leads her to “vacation” in places most young women would not dare venture in the early 1980s — Lebanon, Beirut and Cuba, for example. While she evades real dangers in these tumultuous countries, Dale does get caught up in an intrigue of the heart. She falls in love with a man held in a Costa Rican prison — “a handsome man with entertaining stories, whose words bore the mark of a life well lived.” Her story is not without travail, however,
and she is eventually forced to discover that “the road home is never easy.”

– Linda Stankard