The Quick Cut:
A teen girl who lost her parents the year prior struggles to continue with life. Her extended family convinces her to take a cross country road trip to find her passion for life again.
A Real Review:
Thank you to Stone Ridge Books for providing the ARC for an honest review.
Extreme loss has a way of permanently changing the way you view your life. Sometimes it makes you realize what truly matters and in other cases it makes you freeze in place. There is no real way to tell what way you will take that until it happens to you. For nineteen year old Marly - she takes the loss of her parents badly as the rest of her life gets put on standstill.
A year ago, Marly's life got flipped upside down when her parents died in a car accident. It left Marly frozen, with her in turn dropping out of college and doing nothing but working a dead end job. All of her passion for photography? She leaves it behind as each day is the same as the next. That is, until Marly goes to see her mom's side of the family and they convince her to take a renovated VW bus on a cross country tour. Take the time to do some hiking and find a new path back to truly living life. Will this unexpected road trip help her find her way back to the way she was? Or will it lead her down a new and different path?
The overall concept of this book is a great one, but when it came to the actual details - nothing seemed to align right. To have some words misspelled is normal for any book, but there were a lot of places where the wrong word was utilized. It meant that as a reader I got pulled out of the story and ended up trying to figure out what the writer meant. In addition to that, the anxiety that Marly struggles with doesn't really read like a true anxiety issue. Based on the material given, her anxiety feels like PTSD and considering that, I'm kind of surprised that her super supportive family hasn't pointed out how much Marly needs to see a therapist for it yet. She struggles with anxiety, but she also demonstrates isolation behavior, loses interest in her hobbies, has nightmares, and feels a deep loneliness that she eventually confesses to. These are all signs of PTSD that require therapy to work through.
That being said, Marly's connection to Dylan is super inappropriate. He's setup to be a love interest and her closest friend tries to goad her into pursuing it. However, she just met this guy and she clearly has some major issues to work through. Where this story started as a moving forward tale, it ends up turning into a love story focus. It sets an unhealthy precedent that romantic relationships can fix personal problems and that's the last message anyone needs to hear.
A story with a great setup and terrible details.
My rating: 2 out of 5