A Split In The Road

 

I don’t have very many friends. I’d like to say that it’s because I spend most of my time cooped up in the house with a kindle in my face, with little to no contact with anyone over the age of 8. But that’s total bullhonkey. (Bullhonkey. Dear Jesus that screams Texas.) The truth…90% of my vocabulary is comprised of sarcastic catch phrases and, well….as it turns out, most of the population isn’t to keen on trying to keep up with my version of verbal gymnastics. I do however have 1 very good friend (who coincidently I’ve never actually met in person) named Tina. And Tina and I have this fun (and by fun I mean incredibly demented slightly masochistic) game we love to play with each other called: “Bet I can make you cry.” Oh calm down! I don’t beat the girl…that would be cheating. The rules of the game are simple.

1. Recommend a book (that you read) with the sole purpose of making the other person crumble into a ball of snot sobbing hysteria. If they do… You win!

2. There is no number two. (Told you it was simple.)

The last book she recommended was Julie Hockley’s “Crow’s Row” which…if you read the review, you know I pretty much spent the following two weeks curled up in the fetal position sucking on a passie and asking for my momma. The last book I recommended…well, I’ll spare you the details but let’s just say that I got several emails full of F bombs and threats against my existence.

Anyways, the reason I am rambling like a complete moron is because Tina’s latest gauntlet was J.A. Redmerski’s novel “The Edge of Never.”

In short: She won.

“Twenty-year-old Camryn Bennett had always been one to think out-of-the-box, who knew she wanted something more in life than following the same repetitive patterns and growing old with the same repetitive life story. And she thought that her life was going in the right direction until everything fell apart.
Determined not to dwell on the negative and push forward, Camryn is set to move in with her best friend and plans to start a new job. But after an unexpected night at the hottest club in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, she makes the ultimate decision to leave the only life she’s ever known, far behind.

With a purse, a cell phone and a small bag with a few necessities, Camryn, with absolutely no direction or purpose boards a Greyhound bus alone and sets out to find herself. What she finds is a guy named Andrew Parrish, someone not so very different from her and who harbors his own dark secrets. But Camryn swore never to let down her walls again. And she vowed never to fall in love.

But with Andrew, Camryn finds herself doing a lot of things she never thought she’d do. He shows her what it’s really like to live out-of-the-box and to give in to her deepest, darkest desires. On their sporadic road-trip he becomes the center of her exciting and daring new life, pulling love and lust and emotion out of her in ways she never imagined possible. But will Andrew’s dark secret push them inseparably together, or tear them completely apart?”

Now obviously I could go on and on about the multitude of ways I visualized Tina’s demise after reading this book, but there was another aspect to the novel…so I think I’ll talk about that instead.

The Road-trip.

Road-trip novels are easily some of the most entertaining novels out there. Why? Because not only do you get to experience the thrill of hoping from place to place, setting to setting, but they focus on character growth.

Huh?

Think about it for a second.  Open road. Close quarters. Multiple personalities. Chances are shit is going to hit the fan more than once (whether emotionally or dramatically) and you (the proverbial fly on the wall) get to experience all of it. Especially when the author (much like Redmerski) decides to write their novel from both sides of the fence (that’s slang for companion narration.)

The Edge of Never was a good book, made better simply by allowing the reader into the minds eye of both parties in the car. Did we NEED to know that Andrew was acting (unbeknownst to her) as Camryn’s unofficial bodyguard while stuck on a bus? No probably not, but providing us with that little tid bit of juicy info acted as a catalyst (or reference point I guess you could say) for everything he did from that point on.  Camryn may not have known, but US (aka the reader) knew exactly what was going on making their interaction much more intriguing.

The plot? Think R-rated Nicholas Sparks (Oh…sexy time!) Love, hate, denial, disease, death and depression were all present. Making this novel not only a romance lovers Mecca, but every emotionally destructive girl’s self help manual.

Fantastic book. Worth the 2 boxes of Kleenex it took to make myself look less like a snot monster and more like a human being.

Get it, Live it, Love it…Pass it on!

Happy Reading my fellow Kindle-ites and remember: sometimes you need silence to understand all of the noise. (Take that Yoda!)

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[Rating:4.5/5]

** I’d give it 5 but I wanted a little more “Andrew” narration. I know…I’m ridiculous. Deal with it! **