Reunited

April 15, 2012
Estranged best friends take a road trip to see a band concert at the end of senior year in a tired plot that fulfills all the promises of improbable events with the heart-warming ending readers have come to expect. The car, a 1976 pea-green VW camper van that used to be a clubhouse in Alice's backyard provides the means, with nerdy, organized Alice the glue to hold together bad-girl Tiernan and little-miss-popular Summer. The former friends, who used to call themselves A-Plus, Sunny-D and T-Bird, are making one last go of it. Their trip from Walford, Mass., to Austin, Texas, is characterized, predictably, by madcap adventures and valuable discoveries--about Tiernan's mother and Summer's boyfriend--as well as romance for Alice. This is light fare with plenty of bickering and possibilities for romantic entanglements. Between chapters, readers find the fictional band's song lyrics, which are hysterically pretentious. The book won one of two 2011 Book Launch Awards from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Road-trip fans won't find this remarkably original, but it does satisfy all the typical requirements of the genre. (Fiction. 12 & up)

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2012

Gr 8 Up-Alice Miller, 18, is excited when her parents refurbish her 1976 Volkswagen, aka the Pea Pod, as her graduation gift. The interior is still decorated with memorabilia from her favorite band, Level3. She has one thing in mind: to reunite with her ex-best friends, Summer Dalton and Tiernan O'Leary, who are also graduating. She invites them on a road trip where they will travel from their hometown of Walford, MA, to Austin, TX, to see a Level3 concert. Tiernan agrees to go in order to escape her mother and leaves without telling her; Summer decides to join Alice and Tiernan when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her. Like most road trips, nothing goes as planned and, mixing it with three ex-best friends, it turns into an adventure worth reading. Readers will chuckle, wonder, and believe that the events could probably happen even though some of them border on implausible. The characters are believable and typical teenage girls. While the ending is a bit cliched, it's what readers will hope will happen for these girls, making it the perfect ending. There are a few sexual innuendos and some underage drinking, but nothing that mature middle school and high school students could not handle.-Karen Alexander, Lake Fenton High School, Linden, MI

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.