Author: Morgan Matson
From GoodReads, "Amy Curry thinks her life sucks. Her mom decides to move from California to Connecticut to start anew--just in time for Amy's senior year. Her dad recently died in a car accident. So Amy embarks on a road trip to escape from it all, driving cross-country from the home she's always known toward her new life. Joining Amy on the road trip is Roger, the son of Amy's mother's old friend. Amy hasn't seen him in years, and she is less than thrilled to be driving across the country with a guy she barely knows. So she's surprised to find that she is developing a crush on him. At the same time, she's coming to terms with her father's death and how to put her own life back together after the accident. Told in traditional narrative as well as scraps from the road--diner napkins, motel receipts, postcards--this is the story of one girl's journey to find herself."
I saw this book while I was searching for a new book to read (even though I have a shelf full of books that I haven't read yet at home, but I digress). Anyway, the cover immediately caught my eye. I had finished reading another book recently about a road trip and hoped that this book would be as good as that one was. This book not only met my expectations, it exceeded them.
This book has a lot going for it, there was a little bit of mystery thrown into a self-discovery trip across the landscapes of America. This book did something that not very many books have been able to do, it inspired me. I actually took a short jaunt to Walmart this morning to purchase an atlas and start planning my own Epic Detour.
There are some readers out there that might not like the character of Amy, but I think that you don't necessarily have to like a character for them to be believable. As a person who lost my father when I was close in age to Amy, I could totally identify with the flood of emotions she was feeling about his death. I liked that this book represented not only Amy's journey of self-discovery, but Rogers as well. I also thought it was cool that the book showed how you could be on a journey towards something only to discover in the end that it wasn't exactly what you wanted.
The only complaint that I have about the novel is that there is no way that you can "sip" a Blizzard at Dairy Queen. If that is the only thing that bothered me, obviously it was a great book. With my trusty atlas in hand and awesome songs from the Playlists suggested in the book, I hope to begin my own Epic Detour next summer... thanks to Morgan Matson!
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