7. Along for the Ride

Along for the Ride, by Sarah Dessen (2009).

How have I not discovered Sarah Dessen before? Probably because she writes for teens, though I assumed from the cover that this was adult chick lit and nothing inside the book made think otherwise until I was halfway though it. I remember thinking that more writers should try out protagonists Auden's age, because the summer after high school/before college is such an interesting time.

After her parents' divorce, Auden lives with her college professor mother, who treats her like an adult. She decides to get away from her mom and go stay with her dad, new stepmother, and new baby sister. Her dad is just as absentee as her mom, but Auden starts to develop a relationship with her young stepmother, who she previously though was a dumb blonde. I really liked how Auden begins to see her parents as people with flaws, rather than just parents who don't live up to her expectations.

I'm wishing I posted about this when I first read the book, because some of the details are getting fuzzy. The romance between Auden and Eli is really nice, and starts out so realistically for the age of the characters. The beach town setting also helps show how much waiting around and hanging out teenagers do in real life, which is so different from the urban jet-setting teens in a lot of books.

44. Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking (Aoibheann Sweeney, 2007)

My daily NYT habit has led me to a lot of good books this year. I read this review and immediately requested AOTITUS. That title is way to long for me to keep typing out. I have a weakness for first novels, even though a good one inevitably leaves me waiting years for the author's next attempt. So maddening.

This one's about Miranda, a kind of weird, lonely girl who lives on a tiny Maine island with her father, who's translating Ovid's Metamorphoses. Her mother died when Miranda was three, in what could have been an accident or might have been a suicide. Ovid's stories are woven into Miranda's in a wonderfully natural way. Miranda's father is withdrawn and interested only in his work and she's actually being raised by Mr. Blackwell, a mysterious friend of her father's. When Miranda graduates from high school, her father sends her to New York City to work at a library he founded years before. There, she meets people from her father's past and starts to realize the truth behind the her parents' mysterious past and how they ended up in Maine.

Coming of age stories can be painful and trite, but this one is lovely. I liked that the novel was separated into three sections (The Age of Silver, The Age of Bronze, and the Age of Steel), each named for parts of the origin of the world according to Book One of Metamorphoses, and each of which represents a different part of Miranda's story. It's clever without knocking you over the head. Sweeney has a real gift for language that's both spare and descriptive, and her facility with allusion is really amazing. I usually don't like books that use one source so extensively, maybe because I haven't read enough of the canon to be familiar with most of what's used, but this time it worked for me. Maybe that's because I've read Ovid more than once, and am pretty familiar with Greek mythology in general. But the book is definitely good, and through Miranda, Sweeney sneaks in enough explanation and interpretation that you don't even need to know the stories before coming to this book.