Four for the Road

The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets The End of the Fing World in this dark young adult comedy about four unlikely friends dealing with the messy side of grief who embark on a road trip to Graceland full of "laughter, tears, budding romance, and well-placed insights" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).*

Asher Hunting wants revenge.

Specifically, he wants revenge on the drunk driver who killed his mom and got off on a technicality. No one seems to think this is healthy, though, which is how he ends up in a bereavement group (well, bereavement groups. He goes to several.) It's there he makes some unexpected friends: There's Sloane, who lost her dad to cancer; Will, who lost his little brother to a different kind of cancer; and eighty-year-old Henry, who was married to his wife for fifty years until she decided to die on her own terms. And it's these three who Asher invites on a road trip from New Jersey to Graceland. Asher doesn't tell them that he's planning to steal his dad's car, or the real reason that he wants to go to Tennessee (spoiler alert: it's revenge)-but then again, the others don't share their reasons for going, either.

Complete with unexpected revelations, lots of chicken Caesar salads at roadside restaurants, a stolen motorcycle, and an epic kiss at a rest stop minimart, what begins as the road trip to revenge might just turn into a path towards forgiveness.

Autorentext

K. J. Reilly graduated from Boston University with a BA in psychology then headed to New York City to work in the marketing research departments of several of the largest advertising agencies in the world. She loves reading, writing, dogs, sailboats, cycling, children of all shapes and sizes, and growing her own food. She is the author of Words We Don’t Say. Four for the Road is her second young adult novel. Learn more at KJReillyAuthor.com and on Instagram and Twitter @KJReillyAuthor.

Klappentext

The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets The End of the Fing World in this dark young adult comedy about four unlikely friends dealing with the messy side of grief who embark on a road trip to Graceland full of “laughter, tears, budding romance, and well-placed insights” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).*

Asher Hunting wants revenge.

Specifically, he wants revenge on the drunk driver who killed his mom and got off on a technicality. No one seems to think this is healthy, though, which is how he ends up in a bereavement group (well, bereavement groups. He goes to several.) It’s there he makes some unexpected friends: There’s Sloane, who lost her dad to cancer; Will, who lost his little brother to a different kind of cancer; and eighty-year-old Henry, who was married to his wife for fifty years until she decided to die on her own terms. And it’s these three who Asher invites on a road trip from New Jersey to Graceland. Asher doesn’t tell them that he’s planning to steal his dad’s car, or the real reason that he wants to go to Tennessee (spoiler alert: it’s revenge)—but then again, the others don’t share their reasons for going, either.

Complete with unexpected revelations, lots of chicken Caesar salads at roadside restaurants, a stolen motorcycle, and an epic kiss at a rest stop minimart, what begins as the road trip to revenge might just turn into a path towards forgiveness.

Zusammenfassung

• "In this at once funny and moving novel, it's been just over a year since seventeen-year-old Asher's mom died in a car accident . . . The intergenerational friendship with [a delightful octegenarian] adds to the humor; a philosophical connection with Will provides depth; and a blossoming romance with Sloane brings sweetness to Asher's difficult, deserved path toward healing." The Horn Book Magazine, STARRED REVIEW

  Leseprobe
  Chapter 1 1
  My mom died and everyone says that I'm not handling it well.

  I would think that if I was handling it well, that would be the time to worry. Like if I was going to parties and having friends over and acting normal, because no one should act normal when things are not normal. I mean that would be like watching TV when the house is burning because you forgot to shut the oven off which I only did once. Not because I wanted to die or didn't care that the house was on fire-it was just that I really didn't notice on account of the fact that my mom died and that made me not notice things. But just about everyone found that hard to believe, especially the firemen because they said that when they found me there was so much smoke in the house that I couldn't see the TV and I was still sitting there staring at it anyway.

  Okay, so my mom died twelve months three weeks one day six hours and fourteen minutes ago and some people think that I should be better by now and not burning down the house and maybe I should be smiling sometimes and speaking more and going to parties and because that's not happening I ended up at the Bergen County Hospital Center on Monday night at seven thirty in Room 212 which is on the second floor just turn right past the vending machines and the restrooms on the left.

  Inside Room 212 there's a circle of chairs and boxes of tissues and a coffee setup with Styrofoam cups and cookies with swirls of chocolate on them and everyone here is seventy or eighty or a hundred years old except for me so it's weirder than I thought it would be and it makes me really sad to be here, even sadder than I was before I showed up, especially when one of the really old guys named Henry starts to cry when he tells us about his wife of fifty years and probably four weeks three days fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds or something like that. I look at him-we all look at him-as he gets up to speak and a wisp of cotton for hair hovers like a cloud over his head and his lip quivers. He says her name is Evelyn and she has blue eyes the color of the sky in Montana in winter and then he says that they went on a whale watch in Nova Scotia for their fortieth wedding anniversary and grow sweet peas and tomatoes in their backyard and she saved up sleeping pills and then he helped her mash them up in chocolate pudding so she could go peacefully and on her own terms when she was ready and I'm thinking I'll never come back to Room 212.

  When Henry's finished talking, the moderator who has short blond hair and freckles on her cheeks and looks like Peter Pan except without the green tights turns right to me and says, "Do you want to say anything or introduce yourself to the group or tell us who you lost?" And I say, "No." Then she says, "Please," so I say, "I lost my mom."

  Then it gets all quiet, last-man-on-Earth, apocalypse quiet, until Peter Pan says, "I'm so sorry. How did she die?" and I say, "Me. I killed her."

  That completely sucks the air out of the room and shocks Peter Pan and now all the old people look even more concave and shriveled than they did before I said it but Henry at least stops crying and everyone looks at me with their sunken old-people eyes like I am a monstrosity of unprecedented proportion or one of the great Horrors of the Western World and then they turn away and stare at their feet because people don't like to look at murderers especially if they killed their mom. For the longest time it just stays all quiet and nobody eats cookies or drinks coffee and Peter Pan doesn't know what to say so she just sits there like the rest of them and I feel even worse than I did before I came into Room 212. I mean I have no idea why I said that I killed my mo