Amy & Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

Sometimes in the middle of winter, you just need to read a sun drenched summer road trip novel and Morgan Matson's delightful debut Amy & Roger's Epic Detour fits the bill perfectly.  The best part, of course, is that in Amy & Roger Matson takes the elements of a classic road trip novel and uses them to create a complex and enjoyable story about grief, loss, healing, friendship, family, and romance.

Amy does not want to go on a cross-country road trip this summer.  But her mother has decided that they're moving to Connecticut to California.  Her twin brother is in North Carolina at camp (AKA rehab) and her mother has already begun her transition to a new life on the East Coast.  But Amy and their car are still on the West Coast and now Mom demands that both of them make their way across the country to start the summer in their new home.

 What's the problem with this situation?  Since her father's sudden death a few months ago, Amy hasn't been able to get behind the wheel of a car without panicking.  The solution, it turns out, is nineteen-year-old Roger, the son of an old family friend whom Amy supposedly played with as a kid (although she definitely doesn't remember him being this attractive as a seven year old).  Roger also needs to switch coasts for the summer and has agreed to drive the car--and Amy--across the country.  It turns out that Roger has plenty of his own emotional baggage and both of them need a chance to take a detour from their lives.  Soon a simple drive becomes an unforgettable adventure as Amy discovers that getting lost in between California and Connecticut might be exactly what she needs to find her way back home. 

This novel combines several types of stories (including the roadtrip, life after the loss of a loved one, friendship evolving into love, etc) into a lovely debut novel exploring both physical geography of modern middle America and the complicated emotional geography of loss and recovery.  Amy, as our narrator, is intelligent, sarcastic, bitter, and a little bit broken and her narration is both sharply observant and emotionally conflicted.  Roger remains somewhat mysterious at first but slowly develops into a very sympathetic three-dimensional character;  the reader's understanding of Roger shifts as Amy's does, with more and more information revealed through their increasingly close friendship.  The diverse quirky cast of supporting characters add another wonderful layer to the narrative and the descriptions of the places Amy and Roger pass through on their trip are full of unique details that bring their beauty and weirdness to life.  The relationship between Amy and Roger evolves slowly and realistically and their increasingly strong bond becomes as satisfying for the reader to observe as it is for the characters to experience.  The novel also incorporates images from Amy's travel scrapbook and both characters' playlists into the regular textual narrative. 

This refreshing roadtrip of a debut novel would be a great fit for fans of quirky musical romances like David Levithan and Rachel Cohn's Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist or stories about finding love after loss, such as Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere or Sarah Dessen's The Truth About Forever.

4 1/2 STARS

Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns

John Green

SUMMARY: Quentin Jacobsen has spent the majority of his life in love with the brilliantly mysterious and adventure-addicted girl next door, Margo Roth Speigelman. When Q and Margo were nine, they discovered a dead body together. However, since then their interactions have been limited and vaguely friendly at best. While Margo is well-known and admired for her exploits both small and large at Winter Park High, Q is content with his safe and generally anonymous life of school days spent hanging out near the band room between classes with his closest friends Radar and Ben and weekends spent playing videogames. But Q’s comfortably predictable life is suddenly interrupted when Margo appears outside his window for the first time in about nine years. And what follows is a bizarre and thrilling night that Q hopes will be the beginning of a whole new life in which he becomes Margo’s new partner in her glamorous escapades. But when the sun rises, Margo has disappeared and gone from merely being mysterious to becoming a mystery herself. But when Q explores further, trying to understand their night together, he realizes that Margo is a mystery meant to be solved—by him. As he follows the strange, seemingly disconnected clues from Walt Whitman to abandoned trailers, Q begins to question whether he ever really knew the girl he adored for so long.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE SAYS: John Green strikes again with another smart, funny, and emotionally resonant novel. Before I fully explain why I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, I want to address some critiques of the novel.

In developing this review, I glanced around the online book world to feel out some other reactions to the novel. Paper Towns has been criticized by some readers as being too similar to Green’s earlier novels, especially in terms of characterization. Is it true that Q shares certain qualities of intellectualism and geekiness with Miles and Colin? Yes. Does this nerdy and quirky hero have an intense infatuation with a brilliant but unreachable girl? Yes, he does. However, I argue that despite such similarities, Paper Towns stands out as its own work with its own separate (albeit connected) sets of questions and themes. As in his earlier novels, Green explores the difficulty in truly knowing and understanding another human being. He continues to delve into our constant tendency to perceive others through the window of our own needs, desires, and interests and so creating images of people that usually turn out to be much further from reality than we would like to admit. But while Looking for Alaska dealt with these themes in the larger context of dealing with death and grief and An Abundance of Katherines worked with them in context of the unpredictability of life, Paper Towns examines them head-on, utilizing a detective story format to explore the big mystery of human interaction and relationships.

As usual, Green’s characters are intelligent and quirky and his novel is interwoven with a diversity of seeming unrelated but interesting topics ranging this time from music to cartography to Walt Whitman. The text also manages to capture that strange time at the end of high school when everyone is on the verge of entering a new world and a new life separated from the familiar people and places and when the resulting uncertainty can force unprecedented reactions out of a variety of people.

I really enjoyed the detective story/mystery aspect of this novel. I’m an avid mystery reader and here, Green takes the predictable structure of a traditional detective story and uses it to follow Q’s simultaneous search for Margo and for more honest relationships. I also thoroughly enjoyed the humor embedded into the narrative, especially through Margo’s ingenious plots and Q and his gang’s final, epic road trip. Green also manages to achieve some truly lovely emotional moments between his characters, especially the unsure but determined Q and the fascinating (and somewhat selfish) Margo. Overall, John Green continues to produce witty YA fiction and accordingly my massive literary crush on him continues to grow.

4 ½ / 5 STARS

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Going Bovine

Libba Bray

SUMMARY: Slacker Cameron simply wants to continue coasting through high school and life. But Cameron’s low-expectation existence is rudely interrupted by some unpleasant news: he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as Mad Cow’s disease. So he’s going to die. Soon. Without losing his virginity or even graduating from high school. This, in Cameron’s opinion, sucks. A lot. But just as it seems like he’s going to be spending the rest of his days in the hospital turning into a sponge-brain, Cameron is given a second chance at living by the appearance of Dulcie, a kooky angel in combat boots with a mission for Cameron—a mission that could save both the world and his life. So Cameron sets out on the road trip to end all road trips in the company of a paranoid, video game obsessed dwarf, a Norse god trapped as a garden gnome, and the frustrating but fascinating Dulcie. Along the way Cameron learns to like jazz, gains real friends, falls in love, travels between dimensions, battles a mad scientist, frees the snow globes, saves the world, and finally has sex. For the first time in his life, Cameron is truly alive even as the reality of his own mortality seems to coming ever closer.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: This novel had a lot of hype; a multitude of people wrote rave reviews and then there’s that whole Printz Award thing. Also, I had been intrigued by the premise since I first heard about it on http://www.readingrants.org/ a while ago. So I was pretty excited to finally get my hooves on a copy of Going Bovine. Then I actually read it and it more than lived up to the hype. Nothing could have prepared me for how unmistakably brilliant this quirky, hilarious, touching, and wonderful novel is.

Firstly, I fell in love with Cameron, the hilariously honest and charmingly realistic narrator. From the vocabulary to the subject matter, Cameron’s narration reads as though it is straight from the sarcastic mouth of an actual sixteen-year-old boy. I loved Cameron’s frank commentary on his family, his peers, his surroundings, and his unique situation. Moreover, I greatly enjoyed following Cameron’s development over the course of the novel as he discovered that there is so much more to life than mere survival.

Bray also deserves high praise for her ability to adapt the picaresque format and style for a modern American audience. According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, a picaresque novel can either be a novel with a picaroon (a rogue or scoundrel) as its protagonist or a narrative composed of a variety of episodes connected primarily through a protagonist who is usually undergoing a journey of some kind. In either case, this type of story is usually episodic and frequently uses first person narration. In Going Bovine, Bray has managed to utilize these structural and stylistic qualities within a new, purely American and modern context. The combination of the iconic American road trip with the traditional journey of classic picaresque is a match made in literary heaven. The physical adventure full of kooky characters and fantastical events echoes the equally compelling journey Cameron is undergoing within himself as he learns to embrace life rather than merely coast through it. The creative use of the famous picaresque novel Don Quixote throughout the narrative adds another layer of complexity and richness to an already fantastic novel. Although I have not yet read the classic Spanish novel (I’m putting on my list!), I know the significant role that questions of reality versus unreality play in the narrative. Cameron, like Don Quixote, is on a quest; but also like Don Quixote, Cameron’s journey and experience seems to be constantly shifting between the real and the unreal or the imagined due to the nature of his disease. However, as in the Spanish novel, reality as traditionally or scientifically defined is insignificant when contrasted to the significant questions posed and answered by the apparently imagined journey. Cameron might actually be lying in his hospital bed being read Don Quixote the entire length of his fantastic road trip but his growth in understanding about friendship, love, sex, mortality, and the human condition could not be more real.

Whew! That got a little philosophical! But then this book made me think just as much as it made me laugh and cry. Combining topics ranging from physics to Norse myth to jazz, Libba Bray crafts a fun and fascinating journey that consistently engages the mind and the heart; because at the center of this novel is the simple story of a boy faced with the universal struggle of learning to live with reality of death.

5/5 STARS