By Hilary Weisman Graham
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published June 12th 2012 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
ISBN 144243984X (ISBN13: 9781442439849)


Blurb

1 Concert
2000 Miles
3 Ex-Best Friends

Alice, Summer, and Tiernan are ex-best friends.

Back in middle school, the three girls were inseparable. They were also the number one fans of the rock band Level3.

But when the band broke up, so did their friendship. Summer ran with the popular crowd, Tiernan was a rebellious wild-child, and Alice spent high school with her nose buried in books.

Now, just as the girls are about to graduate, Level3 announces a one-time-only reunion show.

Even though the concert’s 2000 miles away, Alice buys three tickets on impulse. And as it turns out, Summer and Tiernan have their own reasons for wanting to get out of town. Good thing Alice’s graduation gift (a pea-green 1976 VW camper van known as the Pea Pod) is just the vehicle to get them there.

But on the long drive cross-country, the girls hit more than a few bumps in the road. Will their friendship get an encore or is the show really over?

The Good

  1. The fangirls.  I was a teenybopper once, so I felt like I could really relate to that aspect of the story. Making up dance routines to your favorite boy band songs and then putting on shows for your parents? Yup, definitely did that several summers in a row.

  2. The song lyrics.  I really enjoyed the song quotes spread throughout the story and how they tied back to the plot.


The Bad

  1. The stereotypical characters.  All the characters in this book are over-the-top stereotypes. Even the flaws and imperfections of the narrators have been done a million times before and are entirely too predictable.

  2. The West Virginia stereotype.  Being from WV, I always hate hate HATE it when you read a book and there’s some creepy, uneducated, dirty hillbilly in the middle of a field who helps the main characters in their charming, ignorant way and teaches them a lesson of humility. This book’s WV stereotype is Gerta, a large hilljack mechanic who trades some work on the narrators’ van for some manual labor. Yes, there are people like this who live in WV but they are not the norm or even the majority in most areas. End mini rant here.

  3. The strange sexual innuendos.  Throughout the book there are many oddly-placed sexual innuendos. While reading, it feels almost like they were tacked onto the dialog after edits to make the characters seem more “hip,” but it just comes off as weird.

  4. The random southern accents.  I realize the road trip the girls take is into the southern part of the United States, but there are a few times where a person will be talking in perfectly plain English and all of a sudden the next time they speak they have a very heavy southern twang. If you’re going to give someone an accent, at least be consistent.


Favorite Quote

"AND TOGETHER WE WILL WALK
DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET
AND THE CARS, THEY MAY CURSE US
BUT THEY WON’T MAKE US RETREAT”


Overall Rating

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t. I felt like it wasn’t very well written or edited and the characters/plot were uninteresting, cheesy, and entirely too predictable.