Review: Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing
Publication Date: May 4th 2010
Pages: 344
Source: Library
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Goodreads

Amy Curry thinks her life sucks. Her mom decides to move from California to Connecticut to start anew--just in time for Amy's senior year. Her dad recently died in a car accident. So Amy embarks on a road trip to escape from it all, driving cross-country from the home she's always known toward her new life. Joining Amy on the road trip is Roger, the son of Amy's mother's old friend. Amy hasn't seen him in years, and she is less than thrilled to be driving across the country with a guy she barely knows. So she's surprised to find that she is developing a crush on him. At the same time, she's coming to terms with her father's death and how to put her own life back together after the accident. Told in traditional narrative as well as scraps from the road--diner napkins, motel receipts, postcards--this is the story of one girl's journey to find herself.

Amy and Roger. Though this is not the best road trip book I have every read, it still is way up there in the ranks of books made of awesome. Amy and Roger's Epic Detour is seriously everything the title says it it. The book follows Amy's voice as she and Roger drive her mother's car from California to Connecticut where she will now be living and near where Roger will be staying for the summer in Pennsylvania. The book is cute and fun and at the same time heavy and full of emotion as Amy comes to terms with the recent death of her father.

Like I have said in other reviews, I love road trip books because they always end up being amazing. This book was no exception. I loved the whole setting of the book from the places they ended up going to the people they met and the sights they saw. The people they met always made the story progress weather in a good or bad way and they all were necessary. I love when everyone in a story has a reason for being in the story, it made it all so much more interesting.

The story is told in Amy's point of view. Amy is a character who has been isolated for a very long time because her twin brother is in rehab and her mother is living across the country in the house she is heading to with Roger. Because of her isolation she isn't used to being with another person and she quiet and insecure at the beginning but she slowly grows when she gets to know Roger and they take their "Epic Detour" off of the planned route. Roger, on the other hand is a few years older than Amy and is going with Amy because he is going to spend the summer at his fathers house, and Amy doesn't drive. Though Roger doesn't have the same insecurities as Amy he has recently gone though a terrible break up with his girlfriend which is part of the plot in the story. One of the main aspect of the story is the slow growing romance that grows between these two, which is what makes this  book so cute.

The end of this story was very open which is equal parts annoying, and good. I wish I did know more about what happened at the end, but the way the story was left off it makes it so that there really is not need for more to be told.