Synopsis:
Rosie’s
always been impulsive. She didn’t intend to set her cheating ex-boyfriend’s car
on fire. And she never thought her attempts to make amends could be considered
stalking. So when she’s served with a temporary restraining order on the first
day of summer vacation, she’s heartbroken—and furious.
To put
distance between Rosie and her ex, Rosie’s parents send her on a cross-country
road trip with responsible, reliable neighbor Matty and his two friends. Forget
freedom of the road, Rosie wants to hitchhike home and win back her ex. But her
determination starts to dwindle with each passing mile. Because Rosie’s spark
of anger? It may have just ignited a romance with someone new…
Review: I’ve noticed it in my
own reading over the years, as it pertains to my favorite authors, but never so
acutely before becoming a book reviewer: The best kind of authors are those
with multi-faceted interests, who expand their storytelling beyond what we would
expect in the first pages of their work, be it in nonfiction or fiction, a
nonfiction author bringing more depth to their subject with other information
about other subjects surprisingly related to it, and novelists digging deep
into their own lives to color their characters, and giving their own interests
to their characters. This may seem to be such an obvious thing, but it’s not
easy to do well. Fortunately, there are a lot of authors who have come through to
the other side after doing it to show us how it’s done, how it should be done.
Jennifer Salvato Doktorski is one of them.
Like
J.J. Howard, the author of That Time I
Joined the Circus, Doktorski is also a first-time YA novelist (there’s a
growing number of them this year, to our benefit), and just like J.J. Howard,
her interests make a novel in How My
Summer Went Up in Flames, which is about a summer road trip. It’s typical
in many novels, but when have you ever read one in which the protagonist,
17-year-old Rosie, has to leave the state, New Jersey in this case, in order to
stay away from Joey, her ex-boyfriend, whose car she allegedly set on fire
after finding out that he cheated on her? This has led to a temporary
restraining order against her, as well as a pending court date. But she’s not
in the best state of mind. Yes, she set on fire on his driveway the box
containing his things that she collected, but the emotions of teenage love,
especially first-time teenage love, run high, and she thinks she wants to get
back together with him. Later on, when she’s asked in Texas what she wants to
do with her life, she remembers that she thought she’d be Joey’s wife, and
they’d raise kids in their New Jersey town. Now what? How does she begin to
define herself as an individual when she’s defined herself all this time as
being a couple with Joey? It takes a
road trip, as mentioned, as well as her next-door neighbor and de facto family
member Matty, and his friends Spencer and Logan, brothers who are the offspring
of a nasty, alcoholic father. Logan is spearheading the road trip because he’s
going to Arizona State University, seemingly for good, never to return to New
Jersey, wanting to leave behind this horrible life.
On her
blog on her official website, Doktorski’s latest post is about her love of road
trips, and the road trip she took in her twenties that inspired the New
Jersey-to-Arizona-via-Pennsylvania-Virginia-Tennessee-West-Virginia-Arkansas-Texas-New
Mexico-California route presented in How
My Summer Went Up in Flames. If you’re wondering where California fits in
when Arizona’s next to Nevada, well, that’s all the more reason to pick up this
novel and see.
But
it’s more than that. So much more.
Doktorski has so richly detailed not only the road trip, but all who are
involved, and their families too, mainly Rosie’s family, who Rosie describes
early on: “…at our house, we yell when we’re happy, we yell when we we’re
upset, we yell when we want someone to pass the remote. It’s what we Catalanos
do." She not only establishes right away that Rosie is not the kind to
deliberately set cars on fire or be that kind of troublemaker, but her writing
also shows how much she cares about these characters, in turn making us want to
know more, which is always a delicate balance in novels. There’s even a moment
at the bus station in Nashville when Rosie, trying to get back home to New
Jersey after deciding that she wants no more of this road trip, meets a man who
calls himself Hope, and instantly, we’re curious about where he came from, what
his life has been like before this meeting. No, Rosie doesn’t change his life
nor he hers, but Doktorski’s writing gets so deep into you that you want to
follow alongside her, picking up the character threads she leaves behind, and
weave them together on your own. It’s not that Doktorski irresponsibly leaves
them behind. Far from it. She has found this way to tell her story, so Hope is
only given two pages, but he never leaves you, no matter how further along you
are on this road trip.
For
potential readers’ safety, I must issue an Extreme Grin Warning. There will be
moments in this novel when you’ll feel like you’re hopped up on sugar, wanting
to know what happens next, and also reveling in such descriptions as when Rosie
and Logan and Spencer and Matty manage to score tickets to the Grand Ole Opry:
“After dinner—the ribs were truly amazing—we head to
Ryman
Auditorium to see a line-up that includes the Charlie Daniels Band (“The Devil
Went Down to Georgia” never gets old, apparently), Lee Roy Parnell, Diamond
Rio, and some other acts I’ve never heard of and never, ever want to see again.”
Ok, so Rosie is not at all into country music, but it’s the kind of road trip
where you might be familiar with country music or you might be into caves and
feel happy reading about Luray Caverns in Luray, Virginia. Put simply, if
you’re not going on a road trip any time soon this summer, you are. This is
your road trip. Low cost and lots of fun. Also, make sure you have Google handy
because like me, you might look up Flintstones Bedrock City in Williams, Arizona,
where the group goes to, and look at photos of it, distracting you from the
story for a few minutes. It actually exists. I’d never heard of it before this.
But it’s there. Fred and Barney, too.
Doktorski
is going to be a major name in YA fiction. From How My Summer Went Up in Flames alone, I know it. The laughter she
triggers comes organically from the characters, from their personalities, from
their reactions, such as when Rosie thinks she’s being attacked by a bat during
a tour in Luray Caverns. I desperately want more from her, and it turns out I
don’t have much longer to wait. Doktorski has worked hard enough to have not
only How My Summer Went Up in Flames
come out in May, but also her second novel, Famous
Last Words, being released in July. At least one YA novel a year from her
would be a blessing. I hope it becomes a regular thing.
Review by: Rory
Rating: 5/5
DIAMONDS
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