Book Review - "Along for the Ride" by Sarah Dessen

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I'm a pretty big Sarah Dessen fan. I read her blog every day and it's quite possible that she is the reason I became a teen librarian. Anyway, Along for the Ride is her latest and I bought it at a bookstore the day it came out.

It's the summer before Auden heads off to college at Defriesne, a prestigious university assumed to be not too far away from her hometown in North Carolina. She planned to spend it at her home -- she's been living with her mom, a well-known and well-admired professor at the U since her parent's divorce -- prepping for her fall classes, but an email from her dad's new wife and new mother changes everything. Auden opts out of the expected and enters the unexpected -- moving into her dad's beachside house in Colby with the stepmom and new little sister, Thisbe.

An insomniac looking to explore her temporary hometown, Auden keeps running into Eli, who she learns is a former biker who hasn't been riding since the accident that killed his best friend. They strike up the kind of friendship only two insomniacs can have -- meeting nightly at the Gas/Gro, then letting the evening take them to whatever's open that late. But then something more develops (a Sarah Dessen book is not complete without a romance) as Eli leads Auden to do all those thing she missed by being an overworked brainiac in high school.

But a person can't just change overnight (pun not intended). When a familiar scenario startles Auden in her new environs, she reverts back to her old ways, distancing herself from the one person she'd become real close with in Colby. But there's still time left in the summer for things to change, and a beachside fake prom.

Like all of Sarah Dessen's books, this one offers a world you wouldn't mind stepping into, that's familiar to your own, but somehow a little better.

* * * *
Four out of five stars

RIYL: Susan Colasanti, Sara Zarr, Elizabeth Scott, contemporary realistic fiction

Trio of Book Reviews!

Intensely Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
It's the summer before Alice's last year of high school, and it starts off just like all the others, with the gang hanging out at Mark Stedmeister's pool. But this summer turns out to be full of surprises, both exhilarating, challenging, and devastating. Alice's cousin Carol is getting married in Chicago, which just happens to be where Patrick is starting school (at MY alma mater, the University of Chicago), so Alice visits him on campus. Lester busts out of town for a week, allowing Alice and her friends to stay at his place, and of course, this doesn't go exactly as planned. And at the end of the summer, something happens that no one expected, that changes the gang forever. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor does it again with the latest Alice book, a compulsively readable book for fans of the series, and one that could certainly pique interest for those that don't know every detail about Alice McKinley...yet. YA FIC NAY

Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti
Watching the evening news, do you ever wonder about the grisly lead stories, the ones where a seemingly normal person does something you can't even comprehend. Do you wonder, who was this person, and what kind of family did he/she have? Well, this is one of those ripped-from-the-headlines stories, told from the perspective of the headline-maker's daughter, Jordan. Jordan's parents have been divorced for awhile. Her mother runs a bed and breakfast, and her dad's your average eye doctor... until he meets Gayle. Jordan notices that her dad's become completely unlike himself ever since he met Gayle, and not in a good way. Gayle has taken his life by storm, and Jordan's unsettled. As his behavior becomes more erratic, one wild, stormy night changes everything. Jordan's life will never be the same. Fans of Deb Caletti's other work will appreciate her realistic, nuanced take on a story like this -- though it's not my personal favorite of hers. Recommended also to fans of Sarah Dessen's books. YA FIC CAL

The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams
I'd been hearing a lot of buzz about this one, so I devoured it last night watching the Red Sox-Yankees game. Thirteen year old Kyra has grown up in an isolated, polygamist community, where no one questions the authority of the Prophet, even as he leads his community's members to do what anyone else would consider, horrible, reproachable things. But Kyra has recently started to come into her own, first when Joshua, a guy around her age, shows interest in her, and in her trips to the library bookmobile. (Her community had a cleansing years ago when they burned every book there, except for the Bible.) She has passing thoughts about wanting to leave, but they become more serious when the Prophet comes to visit her family. She has been chosen to marry Hyrum, her sixty year old uncle. The rest of the book oscillates between Kyra thinking she can escape, and realizing how difficult, and potentially suicidal it could be. The gripping end will keep you on the edge of your seat, or at the very least, up past your bedtime. The writing is spare, at times poetic, and completely true to the thirteen year old narrator. Recommended for those who read Sister Wife and are fascinated by the reality of polygamous compounds existing in certain areas of the United States right now. YA FIC WIL