Reading Burning the Map is much like watching a slideshow of someone else’s vacation. You get a chance to see the same things they did in vivid color, but you also have to listen to their boring stories of events that were probably interesting to experience, yet are pretty dull to hear about.

Casey Evers is a recent law school graduate taking one last trip with the girls before settling down to her new job at a Chicago law firm. Traveling through Italy and Greece, she hopes to reconnect with her friends Lindsay, nicknamed “Sin,” and Kat. The three grew apart during her time in law school, particularly after she started dating her longtime boyfriend John. They arrive in Europe, and then….

Well, there is no then. There isn’t much of a story in Burning the Map, or any kind of plot. Like most people’s vacations, this one involves seeing some sites, meeting some people, then moving on and doing more of the same. In this case, they go to Rome. They meet some men. They fight. They go to Greece. They meet some men. They fight. They go somewhere else in Greece. They… nah, I don’t want to ruin it.

Seriously, until the end, nothing happens in this book. That didn’t necessarily have to be a problem. Books without much plot can work as character studies, as we really get into the mind and heart of the character. That doesn’t happen here.

Two things would have improved the story: if Casey were remotely interesting as a person, and if Caldwell had shown her growth over the course of the book. This story is told in the first-person, which should allow the author to convey a sense of who Casey is, but she never exhibits much of a personality. She’s neither funny, nor witty, nor overly whiny or self-deprecating, like most contemporary heroines these days. She’s utterly bland. She also learns next to nothing about herself over the course of the book, other than Italian men make her hot and John doesn’t. She’s already dissatisfied with her life and her future as the book begins, and one of her friends comments on how unhappy she’s been. Will Casey go back to her boring boyfriend and a future of 14-hour days at the firm, or won’t she? A convenient development at the eleventh hour offers her a parallel to her own situation, but little of what she experiences over the course of the book justifies her ultimate decision one way or the other. It’s never a good feeling to realize you could have skipped 75 percent of the book and arrived at the same ending without missing a beat.

One of Casey’s friends is bland, the other hateful. I didn’t like either of them. The book’s most interesting subplot involves the stepfather of one, but is dropped abruptly midway through, never to be heard from again. The men they meet are all exotic, sexy and one-note. The only character who managed to inspire any interest in me was John, if only because I felt sorry for him. Yes, he works too much and he’s boring. Never mind that he’s a nice guy and genuinely seems to love Casey. It all leads to a climax is painful without being cathartic, and an ending that was probably supposed to be empowering or transcendent or… something. I found it depressing.

Caldwell seems to be aiming for more depth here than in the usual Red Dress Ink release. The book is less about relationships than one young woman’s choices about what she wants from her life. The author accurately captures the uncertainty a person can feel in her post-collegiate 20s, the desire for something more, the uncertainty of how to find it, and the fear of taking a chance. But it takes more than a realistic edge to make a good read. Burning the Map could have used interesting characters, or real character development, or a plot, or all of the above to make it more than a travelogue saddled with a dull story.