Do we all remember how I vowed to buy no books in Feb-March and instead have been compiling a list of all the books I have wanted to buy during this time period? Well, the other day I had to write ALL THE SARAH DESSEN BOOKS on my list. The list is now quite dreadfully long.

Along for the Ride is about Auden, the daughter of two professorial parents, who has spent her whole life being the good child. While her elder brother Hollis screwed up, ran riot and as she puts it “got the only childhood,” she sat quietly in the corner, read books, and studied. She’s never really done the social thing. Or the friends thing.

Two years ago, Auden’s father left them and married pink-loving bimbo Heidi, with whom he has just had a baby, Thisbe. Auden hopes he will be a more accessible, interested father than he was with her, but when she goes to visit she finds that he is as selfish as ever, shut away to concentrate on his writing while Heidi struggles to take care of the baby without any support. (I found this part so hard to read, the gut-hard early weeks of motherhood were still too fresh in my mind, and I had a supportive partner!)

Auden is miserable at first – she doesn’t get Heidi, her Dad is a jerk, and her one attempt to be sociable in this town backfired horribly when she hooked up with Jake, the beloved ex-boyfriend of Maggie, one of the girls who works in Heidi’s clothes shop. Now every girl in town hates her… and the one interesting guy in town, the mysterious brooding Eli, turns out to be Jake’s brother. Ooops!

Gradually, though, things get better. Slowly, Auden begins to realise that her preconceptions about everyone might just be wrong. Heidi, Maggie and the other girls aren’t actually ditzes. Eli has a tragic past. Even her critical, intellectual mother and her cazy fun-loving brother have dimensions she never saw before.

Auden’s mother always says that people don’t change. But Auden is changing, making up for lost time, going on a quest to reclaim her childhood… before it’s too late.

I loved this book. It was a ripper of a read, from beginning to end. I loved that it was about finding the layers beneath people, and about the pros and cons of being an academically smart teenager. Auden is almost unbelievably dim in the ways of real people (particularly real teenagers) but I sympathised a lot with her inability to understand how real, fun-loving, popular teenagers with their weird codes and rules actually work. Also she has a huge amount of personal growth and acquisition of empathy within the story, which makes her very likeable.

I also really liked the fact that the romance was a slow burning friendship, part of the story but not the point of the story – and, as with most real life romances, tangled up with the friends and family of both parties.

The relationship Auden develops with baby Thisbe, and the revelations she has about her own childhood and history, is the heart of the story, and the part that most affected me – babies babies babies! I also liked the iconic use of bikes and bike riding which pulled several of the book’s themes together.

The only part (SPOILERS) which didn’t ring true for me was the end of the story – or, rather, the miraculous change in her father’s priorities, which happens offstage, as a throwaway comment, which was annoying because his selfishness as a partner and father was such a deeply important part of the book. Auden’s revelations about his failings are important, but I really wanted her to call him on them, rather than his moment of truth happening so indirectly. It’s a small flaw, though, in an otherwise brilliant book.

In short – acquiring all of Sarah Dessen’s other books has become a matter of great priority to me. Preferably in matching covers – aren’t they BEAUTIFUL? The artistic equivalent of a Wordle!

Tags: reading, reviewing, sarah dessen, YA