My Ticket to Ride

A true-adventure, coming-of-age tale set in the exhilarating first wave of Beatlemania …


It’s 1964, and 16-year-old Janice is struggling in a grim foster home in Cleveland when she falls suddenly, deeply in love … with the Beatles. They and their music stir in her an ecstatic new sense of freedom. With a friend, she hatches a bold plan to escape their dreary lives and run away to London to meet the Fab Four.


On their own for the first time—in “Beatleland”—they explore a new city, a new culture, and a new life, visiting the hippest clubs of Soho, meeting some nice English boys, hitchhiking to Liverpool …


But unbeknownst to them, the runaways have become international news—and a hunt is on.


Adventure and newfound freedom end abruptly when Janice is apprehended by London police and hauled home to Cleveland and an unforgiving juvenile justice system. Warned by responsible adults to put it all behind her, she doesn’t speak of her extraordinary adventure for more than fifty years.


In this memoir, she looks back with fresh insight on the heady early days of Beatlemania and an era in America when young women exercising some control over their lives presented a serious threat to adult society.


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"Since that blow up about the Cleveland Heights girls, we’ve been playing it rather cool, you know, at all times." — Mick Jagger


"This bold adventure cracks open a time capsule to 1964 … Janice Mitchell paints a sweet reminder of the power music has to save you, to befriend you and to love you through anything life hands you. Even when her parents abandoned her, music didn’t. When her world grew dark, music lit the way forward. If you love the Beatles and the magic of music, you’ll love this fabulous adventure from Cleveland to London to find the Fab Four. It just might spark you to go on your own adventure." — Regina Brett, New York Times bestelling author of "God Never Blinks"