Review: Along for the Ride by Sara Dessen.

Rowena’s review of Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen.

Hero: Eli
Heroine: Auden

Following her parents’ bitter divorce, Auden has the chance to spend the summer with her dad and his new family in a charming beach town. There she meets Eli, and together they embark on parallel quests: for Auden, to experience the carefree life she’s been denied; for Eli, to come to terms with the guilt he feels for the death of a friend.

Sarah Dessen hasn’t written a story that I didn’t enjoy in one form or another and this book kept the love party going. Sarah Dessen is like the Lisa Kleypas for Young Adult fiction. She can’t do no wrong and this was another book that kept me up extremely late at night, making me connect with the characters in this story like no other story has before. You see, Auden is the main character in this story and she’s a night owl. A total night owl. She doesn’t sleep. When she was little, her parents used to fight all the time at night time but they didn’t fight if they knew that Auden was awake and could hear them so Auden took to staying up at night, making noises so that they knew she was awake and they wouldn’t fight. She did it for so long that soon, the fighting continued even when they knew that Auden was awake. Her parents separated and then divorced not too long afterward.

Auden survived her parents divorce. She stayed with her mother while her father went on and married someone else and had a baby and started a new life with his new wife, Heidi. Heidi was so different from Auden’s mother that it wasn’t hard to assume that she’d hate everything about Heidi. Auden had no interest in trying to develop a relationship with her father’s new wife because she had a future to prepare for.

Auden was one of those straight A students who was always studying. Growing up as the daughter of two professors who penned the next great American novel, it was kind of expected. Academia was what she knew and there was always something to learn and some test to study for. Her life with her mother became very staid and Auden wanted something fresh, something adventurous and where better to get adventure than in the small beach town where her father lives.

She decides to spend her last summer before college with her father. It’s been a while since she’s seen him and she really wants to get away from her life for a little bit. Now, she knew that going away for the summer was going to change her but she didn’t count on her life changing as much as it did and she had Eli to thank for that.

Auden has always been socially awkward. She’s not comfortable with personal relationships because she doesn’t know how to have friends. Her life revolves around her school work so it’s hard for her to try to just hang out when all she knows how to do is study and prepare. Coming to visit her Dad (goodness, I forgot what their town is called, dangit and I can’t be arsed to go and check, oh well) introduced Auden to her childhood. The childhood that she never had because she was too busy trying to be the perfect student and the perfect daughter. She was always too busy studying to just go outside and play, get dirty.

All of that changes when she starts working for her step mother, Heidi at her little clothing boutique and meets Esther, Leah and Maggie. These three girls give Auden a crash course in all things normal teenagers their age do in their small town. They talk about boys, they ride bikes and they just hang out.

Watching as Auden grows closer to Maggie and the other girls and then watching her relationship develop with Eli made for a great read. Dessen excels at writing those characters that readers can connect with and in this book, it’s no different. I adored getting to know Auden, I adored watching as she came out of her shell and I loved watching her develop lasting friendships with her friends from that summer.

I can’t imagine being up that late every single night, running errands and living a totally normal nocturnal life the way that Auden and Eli did but I thought it was too cute! Getting to know Eli made for some interesting reading. Eli is suffering from survivor’s guilt and seeing him slowly come back to life was a definite treat. I enjoyed getting to know both Auden and Eli and when I closed this book, I had one of those goofy grins on my face.

There was another mother/daughter relationship in this book and it was another winning relationship for me. I loved how we got to see Auden’s snotty mother come around and when Auden finally tells her about herself, I cheered. It took her so long to frickin’ open her mouth and speak up but when she finally did to both of her parents, Auden became my favorite person. I loved how her new friends and Eli gave her the strength she didn’t know she had to accomplish being just a normal teenager.

The friendship between the four girls in this story was great fun to read about. Their antics took me right back to high school and reminded me of all the fun I used to have with my high school friends. I also enjoyed the relationship that blossomed between Auden and Heidi. I loved that Dessen didn’t turn Heidi into this beast of a step mother the way most step mothers are in these kinds of stories. I thought Heidi was a great character and a fantastic mother.

I also adored Eli. Like really adored him. He’s definitely one of my favorite heroes from SD books, there was just something about the way that he was that totally had me hooked. I thought he was adorable and his relationship with Auden was too frickin’ cute.

Overall, this is one of my favorite Dessen books. It had all of the fixings for a great book and Dessen didn’t disappoint. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of YA fiction and Sarah Dessen books.

Grade: 4.5 out of 5

This book is available from Speak. You can buy it here or here in e-format.

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