Along for the Ride

April 27, 2009
Studious good girl Auden, named for the poet, makes a snap decision to spend her summer before college at her father's beach house rather than with her mother, a professor whose bad habits include male grad students. Auden's parents divorced three years earlier, a split she's not yet over. Her remarried father has already produced another heir, a colicky baby named Thisbe (after a tragic figure from Shakespeare), with his young wife, Heidi, who owns a boutique. Feeling sympathy for stressed-out Heidi, Auden agrees to do the shop's bookkeeping, providing her with an instant social circle—the teenage clerks plus the boys from the neighboring bike rental, including hunky, wounded Eli. Both night owls, Auden and Eli bond when he coaxes her to experience childhood activities—bowling, food fights, learning to ride a bike—that her insufferable parents never bothered to provide. Auden's thoughtful observations make for enjoyable reading—this is solid if not “top shelf” Dessen: another summer of transformation in which the heroine learns that growing up means “propelling yourself forward, into whatever lies ahead, one turn of the wheel at a time.” Ages 12–up.

Rachel Botchan realizes every opportunity to capture the ironic, dramatic voice that has drawn fans to Sarah Dessen ever since her first book. This book's heroine, Auden, is a studious girl who's acted like an adult for most of her 17 years. She embraces the attitudes of her haughty academic mother, including a horror of her "extraneous, overblown, exuberant" stepmother. All that changes when Auden spends the summer between senior year and college in a beach town, living with her father, stepmother, and newborn stepsister. Auden makes friends with a clique of girls, a mysterious young man, and, most importantly, her real self. Botchan perfectly renders the teenage dialogue and emotionally charged situations upon which Dessen has built her reputation. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine