The following review was contributed by: NORM GOLDMAN, EDITOR OF BOOKPLEASURES

There is something magical about vacation romances that seem to encourage you to let go and revitalize your energy and senses. Moreover, perhaps the conditions are ideal to create peak emotional moments as love.

First time author Erica Miner’s novella, Travels With My Lovers, has effectively captured these moments with her titillating adventures of an American woman, who frees herself from the shackles of her prudish upbringing, and a failed marriage that has ended in divorce due to her discovering that her husband was gay.

Narrated in the first person, readers are given the opportunity to peek over the shoulders of the narrator and explore sexual freedoms through the eyes of woman, who finds herself drawn into several amorous encounters during her annual vacation jaunts. The narrator mentions, the principal protagonist’s objective was to set out and explore the landscapes of her origins and to discover a new facet of herself. You may ask, how is it possible to fall in love on a vacation? Perhaps, the highs are higher on a vacation romance, where time is short.

As the story unfolds, we peer over the narrator’s shoulder as we are swept in by the quickness of her romances, where she goes from meeting someone, liking them, falling in love and in no time having sex with them. However, the author does not permit her story to disintegrate into a soap opera. Insights into art, culture, foreign travel, history, food, philosophy and sexual attitudes all form an integral part of the development of the characters and the narrative.

We meet the Italian, Carlo, the first of the narrator’s lovers, and who is very much the catalyst of her sexual awakening and experimentation. Then there was the Frenchman, Gérard, “whose sensitive, artistic nature evoked sympathetic vibrations,” and who had awakened in our narrator a sense of herself. The handsome Swiss, Jean-Jacques proved to be quite a disappointment, and a lesson in the hazards of romantic desires. A married Frenchman Pierre, whom the narrator would have liked to have an affair, however, something in her psyche prevented her from committing adultery. Finally, we end with the Italian Gianni, who presents the opportunity of a committed relationship.

Miner has written an entertaining and at the same time thought provoking book. After reading about the narrator’s various experiences, we have to ask ourselves, is it preferable to live in the moment and the hell with the consequences? Remember, vacations do provide a sample of you and the other person at your romantic bests. What happens when the novelty wears off? How easy is it to move on?