don’t stop now

You know how sometimes a song or a particular book reminds you of a day, or a place, or a season? I’ll forever associate Julie Halpern’s latest novel Don’t Stop Now with summertime, roadtrips without air conditioning, and intense heat. It’ll be a reminder of those shimmering waves of hot air that seem to billow out of the asphalt along the horizon line, of the windows down and the music too loud (so you can hear it over the rush of the wind), and of the inevitable orange snacks you pick up at an anonymous corner store.

On the first day of Lillian’s summer-before-college, she gets a message on her cell from her sort-of friend, Penny. Not only has Penny faked her own kidnapping, but Lil is the only one who figures it out. She knows that Penny’s home life has been rough, and that her boyfriend may be abusive. Soon, Penny’s family, the local police, and even the FBI are grilling Lil, and she decides to head out to Oregon, where Penny has mentioned an acquaintance. And who better to road-trip across the country with than Lil’s BFF, Josh. But here’s the thing: Lil loves Josh. And Josh doesn’t want to “ruin” their amazing friendship.

Josh has a car and his dad’s credit card. Lil has her cellphone and a hunch about where Penny is hiding. There’s something else she needs to find: Are she and Josh meant to be together?

Julie Halpern has a way with characters (and, of course, a way with words) that puts her up at the top of my list when I’m recommending contemporary YA lit. Her stories feature realistic teens, situations, and friendships – the things that broke your heart, changed your life, and formed the foundation of who you decided to grow up to be. It’s no surprise, then, that her latest novel is a winner.

With her mother’s benediction, Lillian, or ‘Lil’, has given herself the summer before college (where Sarah Dessen heroines live forever) to savor being free of responsibilities, adulthood and the real world. But on the first day of that freedom, her pity-friend (yes, I think that’s a thing) Penny calls and leaves a message that changes everything. Lil and her best friend Josh set out on a cross-country roadtrip to find out what’s really going on. What ensues is not only a fact-finding mission, but an adventure that will change them all – perhaps forever.

Ah Penny, and her fateful phone call. Penny has been a ‘quest’ for Lil – her good deed of the year is an ongoing effort to get Penny to hang out. Problem? Lil sees Penny more as an object than as a person. In fact, the reader sees her this way too, in 2D, an object to be pitied rather than a real character. The ‘mystery’ of where Penny is and what she’s doing is fairly transparent and predictable.

But the real meat of the novel is Lil and Josh’s relationship, and how it develops over the roadtrip. Speaking of roadtrip: I have LIVED THIS STORY. Really. I mean, not with a platonic best friend of the opposite sex, but I have driven cross-country in a car without air conditioning and visited these attractions (okay, most of them) in August. Multiple times, actually. I’m not going to lie, Halpern is spot on. It’s the next best thing to actually experiencing it yourself (and very possibly better than experiencing it yourself, to be quite honest).

Josh and Lil come across as real, authentic characters who have reached a point of comfort in both their skins and with each other. Lil wants to take their friendship to the next level, Josh doesn’t want to change anything – about, well, anything. Over the course of the trip they discover that much more about what they want, who they are, and where it all goes from here.

What to say? This novel felt honest. I liked it. I didn’t necessarily get what I wanted, but I did read something true, and that’s probably better. Don’t Stop Now had its flaws (ahem, Penny!), but it will go down for me as one of the most summery books I have ever read. Can’t wait to pick it up on a frigid winter day and relive the heat and memories!

Recommended for: fans of Sarah Dessen and Jenny Han, those looking for a stellar poolside YA read on a hot day, and anyone who has experienced (or dreamed of) a summer road trip with no rules and no responsibilities.

Fine print: I received an ARC for review from the publisher (and then promptly bought my own hardcover copy!).

geographic happiness

While I tend to read mostly fantasy and YA fiction for pleasure, I also occasionally indulge in the travel, food and history non-fiction genres. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the list of books I’ve mentioned on this blog, though. So to even the scales, I picked up a book that’s been sitting in my to-read pile for almost 6 months – The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. And what better time than when actually traveling? This is the one book I read all the way through on my mother-daughter cross-country journey – the rest of the time I was occupied with driving or observing the gorgeous scenery passing by my window at 75 miles per hour (or not-finishing other books).

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

What I liked: Weiner connects his experiences of travel in each country with real, solid people. They are natives, they are fellow travelers, they have ‘gone native,’ etc. Without exception, the reader gets a chance to experience a country through 1) Weiner’s writing, but also 2) his companions’ eyes. It makes for a grounded and varied experience. Each chapter is tinged by the flavor of accents, humor, and the personalities of the subjects in every distinct culture and country.

What I didn’t like: This is just me being picky and persnickety (probably), but as I read, I couldn’t help but think that this book’s target audience are middle-aged, divorced and un-happy Americans. Why? Weiner’s travel itinerary is prohibitively expensive for anyone without some degree of wealth (though he never explicitly encourages travel to any of the countries he visits). When he writes about unhappiness, divorce is repeatedly mentioned as a cause or a motivation for those feelings. That Americans aren’t as happy as they should be, given all of the variables, seems to be an underlying theme of the book. And there you have it.

Academic moment: ‘pop’ sociology (the ‘science’ in the above book description) + journalism = makes me squirm.

Saving grace: Humor. While not wildly hilarious, Weiner made me smile or laugh aloud at many points. I read the funny bits to my mom.

Overall, I recommend this text to travel book aficionados and self-help book addicts. Or if you’re in a good mood and want it knocked out of you (okay, so the last one is a lie. Or mostly one.). Read. Enjoy!

***The photos accompanying this post were taken on my recent roadtrip. More may be found here and here.

roadtrip status: legendary

I’m known for starting off jokes or stories with “There was this one time…at band camp…,” stolen from the gross-out comedy American Pie. I’m going to tell you right now, I’ve never seen American Pie. Oh, I think I watched about half of it once (the second half, if you were wondering) while on a water polo road trip, because our options were that or a VH1 dating show repeat. Television programming in hotels at 2am in the heartland of America isn’t the most, how shall we say this?, edifying of experiences. I’ve also never been to band camp. But I stick by the “there was this one time…” beginning, precisely because it sets you up for the kinds of zany adventures that are my life. Otherwise known as the reason that this blog is subtitled “a series of un-lucky events.”

So there was this one time…

When I was going to study abroad for a semester in Sevilla, Spain. I had two days to get a Schengen Visa on my passport. This is the sticker that lets you get around most of Europe as a student, and to stay for over 3 months. What, you say? There are MONTHS to apply for those things! How did you let time slip past you?! All shall be explained, grasshopper.

Here’s what happened: I decided to study abroad TWICE. In the same year. Yep. My college didn’t have a study abroad coordinator or anything official like that, so I was doing all the research about programs by myself. And I couldn’t decide between a summer program in Viña del Mar, Chile, and a semester in Sevilla, Spain (where my high school Spanish teacher had studied). I related this to my mother, and she asked, “Why don’t you do both?” What a novel idea! So that’s how I found myself with plans to travel to Chile for May, June and July, and then to take off to Spain in August.

Dilemma time. You can’t (or couldn’t, at that juncture) send off your passport for the European Visa certification more than three months ahead of travel. But I was going to be GONE, and needing my passport (in my possession at all times, thankyouverymuch!), for that entire time period! So I called and emailed and cajoled the people at the Spanish consulate in San Francisco, and finally someone said: “Come next Tuesday. I will do it for you that day.” Hurrah! But wait… Turns out that next Tuesday is just 48 hours before my flight to Chile. And turning up in person meant traveling 800 miles each way. We pondered. We conferenced. We compared options. Plan A) I book a flight to San Francisco and navigate the city by myself, getting to consulate at 7am, then hop on plane back home. Plan B) My mother and I team-drive our way to California and back.

We chose Plan B. Mapquest says the drive is 13 hours. Realistically, it’s more like 16. Driving through mountains in southern Oregon and northern California is treacherous, and no matter what they say, sometimes you can’t avoid getting stuck behind a semi-truck doing a steady 40 mph. We set off in the late afternoon, leaving enough time to take short breaks and make it to the consulate (to wait in line) by 6am. We were NOT going to miss our appointment.

Night driving and mother-daughter road-tripping commenced. It actually wasn’t too terrible on the drive down. We both of us guzzled coffee like it was going out of style, and were at the ‘barely keeping our eyes open’ stage by the time we hit San Fran. At 5am. My mother suggested we find the consulate and then get more coffee. It sounded like a decent plan to my sleep-deprived senses. We walked by the office, found a little coffee place on the corner (open!), sat down…and I fell asleep over my book. My mother shook me awake an hour later, and we went to stand in line (second! Not bad.). Three hours later, I had handed over my precious passport and an exorbitant amount of money, and been assured that I would have my it back in time for my flight.

Now for the trip home! Ha ha. We were on a bit of a high at the success of the mission, and my mom suggested a short jaunt down to Fisherman’s Wharf and (maybe) food before the drive home. So we got on a trolley car and set off. I saw my first publicly-smoked joint on the ride over, and then we had a lovely lunch on a patio overlooking the Bay. Well, what you could see of the Bay. It was foggy and a bit damp, but I was used to that as a Seattlelite.

THEN we set off. Bad decision. We should have used that extra bit of energy and adrenaline to start off the endurance test that was the drive home. Oh, it was torture. Each of us would drive for about an hour at a time, just barely keeping our eyes open and our wits about us, tumbling into a doze as soon as we got out of the driver’s seat. At one point, in far northern California, we were both so tired that we pulled off to the side of the highway and slept for three hours in the shade of olive trees. The sun eventually woke us when the car became too warm. And on it went…driving until bleary-eyed, then an all-to-brief reprieve. Repeat until home.

We got home with twelve hours to spare, and wonder of wonders! the passport was ready. I can’t remember what we talked about on that trip, although I do vaguely recall some admonitions about staying safe in South America. I’m just amazed we didn’t scream at each other or drive off the road from pure exhaustion. I later got on the plane safely, and study abroad was amazing and untroubled as far as travel went (Sort of. That story’s for another time.).

Why, perchance, do I mention this several-years-past feat of mother-daughter driving? Because we’re doing it again. Extreme version. I move from Atlanta to Seattle in mid-August, and my mom and I are driving it together. Should be…interesting. 2700 miles of interesting. I welcome any suggestions of silly and fun places to stop along the way. After all, we’ll need something to talk about!