Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour
Author: Morgan Matson
Published: May 4, 2010 from Simon & Schuster
Genre: YA Contemporary
My Rating: 4/5
Amy Curry is not looking forward to her summer.
Her mother decided to move across the country and now it’s Amy’s responsibility to get their car from California to Connecticut. The only problem is, since her father died in a car accident, she isn’t ready to get behind the wheel.
Enter Roger.
An old family friend, he also has to make the cross-country trip – and has plenty of baggage of his own. The road home may be unfamiliar – especially with their friendship venturing into uncharted territory – but together, Amy and Roger will figure out how to map their way.
This was such a great book to get me into the summer mood. It was lighthearted and witty while driving in a meaningful message about self forgiveness. I loved that they were visuals from the road trip, it made the book feel even more real.
Amy is dealing with the loss of her father. You can tell from the first page that she was very close to him, and felt his loss strongly. As a reader, we get to see Amy finally recovering from it and being okay with what happened. It wasn’t at all always mentioned or in your face, but it was always in the background and the presence of it was always there. Matson bought up the issue when it was the most natural, and put the pieces of Amy back together very tastefully. That was my favorite part of this book.
Actually that’s a lie, because my favorite aspect of this book was the pictures. Maybe it’s a tie between Amy’s character development and the pictures. I found awesome songs off of their playlists, and I really want to take a road trip while keeping a ‘travel journal’ of some sort.
Roger, the ‘stranger’. He was interesting because we didn’t really know much about the guy. Still kinda don’t. If I’m being honest I didn’t swoon over him or anything, and I didn’t like his extra story line. But granted I never like it whenever an author gives a character the baggage of still getting over another person. Even through all of that, I still wanted Amy and Roger to get together, so it was bearable.When I put aside a few things there’s no denying that, Roger is a good person and has pretty great music taste.
One thing that I wanted to see more of was Amy’s interaction with her mother and brother. I found them to be interesting characters, and I wanted to see how things ended up with Amy’s relationship with her mom. They have a broken family, they all lost someone they loved, and they all are still healing from it. With Amy’s adventure, I felt like she was ready to talk about it and clear things up. Hopefully she was able to do that with them, but we’ll never know for sure.
Overall, a great contemporary summer read with a cute romance and complex characters. Pretty much the perfect combo for a wonderful book.
Sa's World 