Four for the Road
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets The End of the F***ing World in this dark young adult comedy about four unlikely friends dealing with the messy side of grief who embark on a road trip to Graceland full of “laughter, tears, budding romance, and well-placed insights” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Asher Hunting wants revenge.
Specifically, he wants revenge on the drunk driver who killed his mom and got off on a technicality. No one seems to think this is healthy, though, which is how he ends up in a bereavement group (well, bereavement groups. He goes to several.) It’s there he makes some unexpected friends: There’s Sloane, who lost her dad to cancer; Will, who lost his little brother to a different kind of cancer; and eighty-year-old Henry, who was married to his wife for fifty years until she decided to die on her own terms. And it’s these three who Asher invites on a road trip from New Jersey to Graceland. Asher doesn’t tell them that he’s planning to steal his dad’s car, or the real reason that he wants to go to Tennessee (spoiler alert: it’s revenge)—but then again, the others don’t share their reasons for going, either.
Complete with unexpected revelations, lots of chicken Caesar salads at roadside restaurants, a stolen motorcycle, and an epic kiss at a rest stop minimart, what begins as the road trip to revenge might just turn into a path towards forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Struggling to process his mother's death, New Jersey teenager Asher Hunting embarks on a revenge quest in this riveting road trip epic by Reilly (Words We Don't Say). Asher has been attending a grief support group ever since his mother was killed by a drunk driver "twelve months three weeks one day six hours and fourteen minutes ago." There, he meets fellow teens dry-witted Will and motorcycle-loving Sloane, as well as elderly, cantankerous Henry, and asks them to accompany him on a road trip to Graceland. Each of them has their own reason for going, but Asher doesn't tell them what sparked this excursion: he's considering killing his mother's murderer ("Which way would be better, the slow way or the fast way or no way at all?"). As Asher uncovers more about the accident, he'll have to weigh the price of catharsis, and what he's willing to sacrifice to get it. Reilly uses empathetic prose, and Asher's by turns biting and achingly earnest voice ("Everyone wants to pretend that somehow this will all be okay if we just go to therapy and eat cookies and disappear until we're better"), to expertly portray the white-cued group's journey through individual and shared grief. Ages 14–up.