Taut and fearless, mixing innocence with daring honesty, Jones's stories overturn our understanding of what it means to be young. A man on a mission to "save" people finds himself drawn to a brothel; two young women create mayhem in a homeless shelter; a group of Evangelical American teenagers descends on a quiet Costa Rican sugar cane town; a girl who grows scales no doctor can remedy finds solace in a friendship with a classmate who doesn't eat. From the wilds of Tennessee to Costa Rica's gritty capitol city and suburban America, Unaccompanied Minors explores the consequences of acting in a...

Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar.

By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience as a young American traveler while pondering her role as an outsider in the cultures she temporarily inhabits. Her wanderlust fuels a strong, high-adventure story and, much in the vein of classic travel literature, Jones's picaresque tale of personal evolution informs her own transitions,...