Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen

Grade:  C-
Not particularly recommended. 


If you can tell me that you can walk through your library's YA section and not notice Sarah Dessen, I call your bluff.  She's written a ton of books. 

Along for the Ride is a super easy peasy read and if it were food it would likely be Peeps with questionable nutritional content.  In this book we meet Auden, a high school girl spending the summer with her dad and his new family.  Clearly Auden's parents are a bit off considering her name is Auden (yes after the poet) and her brother has an equally odd name that escapes me for the moment.  Her parents are divorced and her mother seems  to enjoy the company of her grad students while her dad has a new wife and baby.  Auden hasn't slept at night for quite some time and in her insomniac wanderings crosses paths with an introvert named Eli.  They form a dynamic duo of insomniacs who bond over junk food, coffee and pie.  Oh and BMX bikes, hence the cover.  Eli along with some local girls that Auden meets at her clothing boutique job teach her what being a normal teenager is like. 

Sarah Dessen is the YA intro to romance novels.  If you're a teenager reading Sarah Dessen and liking her a lot, I'd be willing to bet that as an adult, you'll be devouring Jennifer Crusie and Kristan Higgins.  Maybe because it's like a watered down version of one of those books or maybe it just isn't Dessen's best.  The book didn't do anything special for me.  It wasn't bad but it wasn't good either.  I'm willing to give her another chance and welcome anyone's suggestions and recommendations of which titles you liked.  This is the light side of YA fiction, certainly lightyears different from Please Ignore Vera Dietz and Looking for Alaska.  The plot wasn't interesting enough for me and I found the characters to be almost awkward and unlikable.  It was the book version of Peeps, Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles, pick your poison.  Not every YA book can be as fantastic as a John Green or A.S. King.