Reviewed June 30, 2006.
Delacorte Press, New York, 2006. 183
pages.
Available at Sembach Library
(J MCN F COO).
I loved this
book! I read most of it while waiting an
hour and a
half for a doctor appointment. I
embarrassed myself laughing out loud in the waiting room.
(To make things worse, the others waiting
were German speakers.) Then of course I
couldn’t go to sleep that night until I had finished it.
Eleven days
ago, Brit got her
driver’s license, just after the end of her junior year of high school. Now her parents are leaving for two weeks,
and Brit’s supposed to stay with Nannie, her eighty-six-year-old
grandmother. Nannie doesn’t have a car
either, because Brit’s mother told her that she was too old to drive
any more, cut
up her license, and sold Nannie’s Cadillac.
Brit doesn’t
have long to
think they will be a boring two weeks. Shortly
after her parents drop her off, a man pulls up
with a rental car
for Nannie. She’s determined to go to her
sixty-fifth college dorm reunion. She and
her three roommates had never missed a year until last year, when their
children
said that they were all too old and sick.
Nannie’s not
only planning to
drive to the reunion, having renewed her driver’s license, she’s also
planning
a kidnapping. Her friend Aurelia has
been placed in a nursing home because her son claims she has
Alzheimer’s. Nannie and Flo, another of
“the girls,” are
going to break her out. It looks like Brit
will get to spend two weeks with a friend.
Well, there’s
one little
problem. Nannie’s too short to see the
road when driving the big van she rented. Trying
to back out of the driveway, she tears up the yard
and doesn’t
even make it to the road.
That’s when
she turns to
Brit. So what if she’s only sixteen, and
not old enough to legally drive a rental car? So
what if she’s never driven on the highway before? She’s
their only hope to get “the girls” to
their reunion. Poor Aurelia, stuck in a
nursing home, is looking forward to their coming. After
all, if Brit is caught, she’ll probably
only never get to drive again for about the next ten years.
That’s only
the
beginning. No step in their journey or
their kidnapping caper is simple. The
story is delightful, insightful, suspenseful, and completely hilarious.
This book
reminded me of Joan
Bauer’s wonderful Rules of the Road. Both have a young teenager learning wisdom
from someone
older and wiser,
but frailer, while learning about navigating the highway—both the
physical
highway and the highway of life.
Review of another book by Caroline B. Cooney:
Goddess
of Yesterday
Copyright © 2006 Sondra Eklund. All
rights reserved.
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Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund
