Traditional format (digital). Release date: March 11, 2025

One Year and a One Way Ticket is a biography/memoir about Danika Smith. The 23 year old Canadian was rejected acceptance to veterinary school so bought a one way ticket to Sri Lanka and spent a year travelling through Europe and Asia. Smith did the year spending as little money as possible so she spent her time staying in hostels, working in exchange for accommodation and couch surfacing.

This was an easy read. I enjoyed all the stories from the different places she stayed and she brought the regions and people to life. While a lot of the book was biographical and a travelogue I enjoyed how the memoir elements were woven in nicely. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves to travel and read books about different regions and those single (women) or low budget travelers who want to see the world.

I enjoyed this book and I give this book a 4.5/5! The only thing preventing me from giving this a full five stars is that I found several times in the book the writing/style was a little awkward (that's the best way I can describe it) which is typical for memoirs in my experience. For example choppy in parts with short sentences and then into longer sentences so it lost the flow when I was reading. I also lost track of the time/days that she spent in each place and would have loved to have this info in the chapter headers or pages where it shows the maps she travelled so you could see how much time was spent in each region that the book was broken down into (this was not at least in the e-copy I read).

Thank you to Atmosphere Press and Net Galley for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!