C+
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity (stranded, safehouse, etc), Road Trip
Archetype: Diverse Protagonists
I love road trips (as long as I don’t have to drive or navigate or really do anything other than eat snacks and sing early 2000s pop music). But I really love road trip books: the forced and shared isolation, the constant of the interior space against the changing of the external, the stops along the way, and the road itself: what it means and what it makes possible.
So with all my love of road trip books fluttering inside me, I picked up Mimi Grace’s debut novel Along for the Ride (which, may I say, has one of my favorite covers so far this year). Along for the Ride delivers on its premise of a fun and tumultuous road trip, but didn’t have quite enough plot to fill itself out.
There’s been no hiding the ill-will between Jolene Baxter and Jason Akana ever since Jolene’s drunken behavior at her sister’s wedding five years earlier. As the best friend of the groom, Jason had no qualms letting Jolene know exactly what he thought of her, and they are still barely able to be in the same room together. When Jolene’s sister and her husband move across the country, Jolene is all ready to help by driving a moving van sixteen hours with her dad. When her father bails in favor of a trip to the Bahamas, Jason is recruited to help instead.
Over the course of the drive, Jolene and Jason are faced with the fact that they maybe don’t hate the other person as much as they thought they did. Jason is impressed with Jolene’s passion for her career in PR and her aspirations for the future. And Jason might seem boring and uptight, but he has a huge heart and Jolene finds his quiet shyness a comfortable companion to her warmth and unreserved openness.
I loved Jason and Jolene. With both of their personalities so vivid, their distress over their growing attraction to each other is certainly charming. The characterization in general shines, including with side characters like Jason’s mom and aunt, who are both funny and fully realized. It also warmed that special place in my heart that loves interracial romance where each partner is a person of color. In Along for the Ride, Jolene is Black and Jason is Tongan-American.
What is supposed to be an easy trip unravels into several messy days as disaster after disaster strikes. One thing I loved about this first half of the book is that it’s a cute collection of several crowd favorite romance tropes: forced proximity, a brief fake relationship, only one bed. Their trip together is fun and chaotic and sexy and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But this driving (get it?) action of the book ends less than halfway through, and the second half is left to wander aimlessly behind, paling in comparison to a bright and entertaining beginning.
After returning from their road trip, Jolene and Jason try to navigate a casual relationship amidst their busy lives. But the lack of any forward moving conflict in the second half of the novel means that the reader spends a fair amount of time watching Jolene and Jason doing their jobs or volunteering. While I understand that these moments are meant to help to give richness to the characters’ lives—Jason volunteers with an after-school group! Jolene deals with rude clients!—they were just things that happened, as opposed to things that happened for a reason. Also, Jason is a dentist, which is nice and all, but I do not want to read even a single second of dentistry in my romance novels. (I apologize to any dentists reading this. But I stand by it.)
There were definitely plenty of moments where the relationship between Jason and Jolene is developing and being tested. There were also, however, a fair amount of moments like this:
After the meeting that included drafting Carmen and Jessica’s vision for their launch party at the beginning of September, Jolene and Yvonne walked their clients out. Jolene smiled and waved goodbye when they entered the elevator, and she bit down the sarcastic comment she wanted to make under her breath.
“You’re still coming to spin class with me this week, right?” Yvonne asked. They stopped at the junction between their offices. Yvonne’s girlfriend, Diana, had been called in as the understudy last minute for an opera role. It left Yvonne without anyone to go to the last week of a six-week program she’d found on Groupon.
I couldn’t find what the purpose was of so many of these scenes. They didn’t seem to particularly move any plot, and with their personalities already so well established in the first half of the novel, the information about the characters’ day to day lives that was revealed was occasionally supplementary, but often gratuitous.
There are absolutely cute scenes between Jason and Jolene in the second half of the novel, even as they lie to themselves and each other regarding the depth of their feelings for one another. There is also a small uptick in action as the story gets down to the wire. Two incidents, one with Jason’s mom and one with Jolene’s job, raise a bit of tension towards the end of the novel and serve as the final push to bring the couple together.
If you like romance novels that include a lot of what the characters are simply doing in their everyday lives, you might be delighted by the second half of Along for the Ride. I know there are readers enjoy seeing a lot of these real life moments. But for me, the mundane of Jason and Jolene was woefully lackluster in comparison to their more adventurous start. My enjoyment of watching these two opposites attract one another aside, Along for the Ride just didn’t have enough plot to stretch the whole of the novel.
A note on narrative theory: if you are at all interested in literary or narrative theory as a discipline, the road is an example used by Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin in his examination of chronotope and genre. It’s one of the only things I strongly remember from my Narrative Theory course in college, which was an absolute doozy. But chronotope is a fascinating way of understanding temporal and spatial connections in literature and how narrative is built. If you are really interested in the philosophy of literature, specifically settings, for some reason, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” by Bakhtin might interest you.
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Thanks!
I loved this review — “they were just things that happened, as opposed to things that happened for a reason” — what a perfect way to put it. And the scene you chose to quote demonstrated that I would HATE this book — who the fuck cares that Yvonne found a six-week program on Groupon??? I think that some authors are told that details make their writing more “real” but those details have to be chosen carefully to add, not detract. But it really is a great cover.
That scene reads like the kind of thing an author might need to write to get the character to where the important action is, but not actually include after the first draft either at all or cut down to a couple of sentences.
I LOVE the new trend to stylized drawn covers. So much personality and individuality in many of them. And drawings can show situation and action in a way that’s hard to achieve in a photo shoot, never mind stock photos. Publishers, keep employing those talented artists! And SB team, maybe you could interview an artist sometime?
How about a rec league for road trip romances?