22718685Title: Joyride

Author: Anna Banks

Publisher:Feiwel & Friends

Publication Date: June 2015

Genre: Young Adult Fiction/Contemporary

Series or Stand Alone: Stand Alone

 

 

Synopsis can be found here.
I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 

 

Review:

Carly Vega works hard at school and at her job at the gas station on the night shift. She keeps her head down, trying not to draw attention to herself. Until one night, a masked gunman holds up an old man in her parking lot.

Arden Moss is restless and bitter. To get back at his dad, he takes up doing serious pranks around town, sure to offend his father the Sheriff. But one night he encounters Carly and she surprises him in a way he didn’t think he could be. And he surprises her too.

This book is hard for me to review. There are a lot of great things about Joyride. I like Banks’s writing style and her characters. Carly is smart but also <gasp> works really hard in school. She wants straight As and she keeps her head down and out of trouble. I love an intelligent heroine, especially one that has to work at what she wants. Arden is a little cookie cutter-ish for me, but he was okay. I wasn’t swooning for him or for them to be together. But I was invested in Carly enough to want her to be happy and to see what happened.
Carly and her brother Julio are saving up to bring their parents back over the boarder, smuggling them in to the tune of $15K per person.

I liked the tension and the themes the book brought to life, especially the dynamics between Julio and Carly. Carly feels guilty for wanting to be a normal teenager, having a life and friends. She feels guilty that Julio is doing so much work and had to drop out of school to make money to try to support them and get their parents back across the border. I’ve had friends where I think the family pressure mirrors this story perfectly, where family expectations are fierce and intense and the person is drowning in them. It’s sad but real and Carly is a very sympathetic character. She is doing everything she can.

But even with these important and gritty realities, the ending is a little hard to swallow. I felt like it wrapped up too simply and there’s a lot that wasn’t addressed. Still, I think Joyride is a solid contemporary fiction with some hard truths thrown in.

Rating 6 Good