Road Trip!

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Listen to Lynn Rae Perkins introduce and read from As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth

School's out and freedom beckons. Warm sunshine and leisure time herald the call of the open road, with sandy beaches and mountain peaks waiting to be explored. The teens in these recent young adult novels hit the road, experiencing life-changing encounters along the way. Wry humor, newfound courage, and keen insight accompany them through danger, excitement, and personal growth.

Taking It Personally
"For many, many minutes he looked, unbelieving, at the empty air where the train had been. Then he turned in the other direction. It was a mirror image of emptiness, with an identical lesson in perspective." Traveling cross-country to camp, Ry, 16, hops off his train when it pauses for repair, wanders into a field seeking cell phone reception, and finds himself stranded in the middle of Montana when the train leaves without him, in Lynne Rae Perkins's As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (HarperCollins, 2010; Gr 7 Up). Ry starts walking, and several mishaps later, arrives at a small town with a dead cell phone, a black eye, and one boot. Kindhearted jack-of-all-trades Del comes to Ry's rescue, driving him home to Wisconsin where his grandfather Lloyd should be house-sitting while Ry's parents sail the Caribbean.

But Lloyd has hit his head, suffered amnesia, and wandered off, and a monkey has stolen Ry's parents' cell phone. Ry and Del's laugh-out-loud trek is strewn with wacky characters including car-thief Carl, lead-footed despite cataracts and Alzheimer's. Perfect narrative and spot-on dialogue follow the duo's journey to Florida in search of Ry's parents, in an enjoyable ramble weaving themes of coincidence, luck, adventure, and risk.

As a ward of the state, London teen Holly Hogan has bounced between group homes for most of her 14 years, in Siobhan Dowd's Solace of the Road (Random, 2009; Gr 8-11). When she discovers a long blond wig in her foster mother's closet and puts it on, she looks five years older and feels transformed. "I kept brushing for love and for money. 'Solace,' I said with every stroke. 'Call me Solace.' And I was Solace, Solace of the road, walking into a night sky, thumb out and fag in hand. I was off to Ireland, where Mammy was and where the grass was green. I wasn't sure what town she was in, but I'd find her. I would."

Holly takes off for Ireland, hitching rides and smuggling herself onto a ferry, in a story laced with danger and humor. As Solace, Holly assumes street smarts and bravado that take her into risky situations, while she struggles with inner doubts and fears. Flashbacks fill in details of Holly's disinterested mother and her abusive past as she works through repressed and recovered memories on her way to a fresh start.

Group Effort
"'All I want is one day where the good guys win. One day where the world makes sense. Just one day, where the world is fair. Where it all adds up to what it should be. Just one single fair day. Is that too much to ask?'" Destiny, 17, discovers an unattended convertible with keys in the ignition, and recruits three fellow boarding school students to join her quest for a fair day, in Mary E. Pearson's The Miles Between (Holt, 2009; Gr 9 Up).

Estranged from her family for years, Destiny defines her existence through routine predictability and an obsession with numbers. Coincidences and lucky breaks, including a presidential encounter at a roadside cafe, accompany the truants to Destiny's hometown in a funny, touching story laced with clues to the teen's past. The surprising ending will leave readers pondering the book's themes of trauma and grief, chance and fate, and friendship and fairness. "For a couple of hours, I am outrunning chance. It is a day like no other. A once-in-a-lifetime day, and it makes me wonder: What kind of journey am I really on? One to lead me away from all that is unfair in my life, or a journey to lead me back to all that is right?"

Albert Borris's Crash Into Me (S & S, 2009; Gr. 9 Up) follows the "Suicide Dogs," four troubled teens on a cross-country road trip visiting the graves of celebrity suicides, with a pact to end the trip by killing themselves in Death Valley. Lonely narrator Owen, a sophomore, blames himself for his brother's accidental death, and has attempted suicide six times. He met Jin-Ae, Frank, and Audrey in a suicide chat room, where the unhappy teens bonded over shared despair about their lives.

Candidly snarky dialogue reveals backstories and inner turmoil as the group travels to the gravesites of Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, and Kurt Cobain. Peppered with chat-room flashbacks and Top Ten Lists ("Top Ten Biggest Not-Suicide Deaths We Can Think Of"), the story explores the nature of suicide and depression, teen sexuality, repressed memories, families, death, and grief, yet shimmers with hope as the four become increasingly reluctant to end their trip. "I don't know if I want to die," writes Owen. "I just want to be happy. I want to feel better."

A Matter of Life or Death
"Simon and I had never been apart, not one day in our entire lives. We never even slept one night in different rooms. But our getting into that car with Mitch and Lilly in the first place was what started to drive an unstoppable wedge between us." When their mother runs off with yet another boyfriend, brothers Jonah, 16, and Simon, 14, leave their rural New Mexico shack, and set off, gun in backpack, to meet their father, soon to be released from prison in Arizona, in Andrew Smith's In the Path of Falling Objects (Feiwel & Friends, 2009; Gr 9 Up), set in 1970.

Hitching a ride with psychotic killer Mitch, 19, and flirtatious Lilly, 16 and pregnant, the brothers are ensnared in brutal violence and manipulation, even as they compete for Lilly's attention. They carry a pack of letters from their older brother Matthew who is fighting in Vietnam and yielding to hopelessness, his descent providing a piercing parallel to Mitch's increasing madness. Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's work, this tense account of a road trip gone perilously off course is rich in its consideration of family and brothers, violence and Vietnam, and motifs including gravity, meteorites, maps, and a tin statue of Don Quixote stowed in the backseat.

"As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life...Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe." Cameron, 16, is slouching sardonically through life when he is diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, "a fatal virus that eats holes in your brain, turning it into a sponge," in Libba Bray's hilarious Going Bovine (Delacorte, 2009; Gr 8 Up).

A pink-haired, sugar-obsessed angel named Dulcie sends Cameron off on a mysterious quest to find the cure with hypochondriac Mexican-American Gonzo as a sidekick, and acquiring a sarcastic yard gnome claiming to be the Viking god Balder along the way. Cameron's zany road trip wends its way from Texas to Disney World by way of New Orleans jazz clubs, a happiness cult, and an MTV-style "party house," in an uproarious laugh-out-loud tale. Readers will relish the Don Quixote references as they ponder the reality of Cameron's experiences--hallucinations or not? Bray weaves together musings on the meaning of life, the experience of death, quantum physics, parallel realities, pop culture, music, Norse mythology, snow globes, reality television, and destiny, pairing deadly serious questions with extravagant humor.

Students longing for a summer adventure needn't look further than these poignant and original stories.