We’re Never Getting Home is perfect for the summer concert season. It’s a story about friendship, family, and speaking up for ourselves. I ended up falling in love with it! Keep reading this book review of We’re Never Getting Home for my full thoughts.
Summary
Jana Rubio and her best friend, Maddy Parsons, have an epic senior year finale queued up: catching their favorite band at the Orchards, an outdoor music festival a two-hour drive away. When a blowup over Maddy’s time-sucking boyfriend exposes a rift that may have already been growing between them, Jana calls off their joint trip and gets a lift to the festival from her church friend Nathan…only to realize Maddy and her boyfriend are along for the ride, too.
All Jana wants is to enjoy the concert and get home as soon as possible. But then Nathan loses his car keys crowd-surfing, and it’s up to Jana and Maddy to find them. As they navigate stolen phones and missing friends, scale Ferris wheels and crash parties, the two of them are forced to reckon with the biggest obstacle of all: repairing their friendship.
Will Jana and Maddy find their way home—and also back to each other?
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
I will always read about friendship breakups and complex friendships. These relationships can cut a whole out of us. Can destabilize everything we think we know. With flashbacks to the past, we witness the cracks forming, the unspoken resentments, the strain. All these layers of memory and music which transports them. Echoes of the past haunting our car rides. It’s a book that takes place over a day, but with the flashbacks it feels longer. At the beginning, the flashbacks were a little confusing, but as the distance began to close, they were clearer.
We’re Never Getting Home is about the knowledge that sometimes things might just not be able to be fixed. It’s a celebration of the moments you don’t plan, the pieces of someone we don’t expect, and the creation of a friendship. The push and the pull of a friendship. All the moments which solidify a bond, until it dissolves. Some friends come and go, it doesn’t mean they weren’t great, but it’s knowing all friends – all people – change. If we can’t reconcile that, then it’s doomed to fail.
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I felt for Jana and at some points felt like she was talking to me directly. Her need for control, her desire to be perfect, but also her need to push back, speak up a bit more. Find We’re Never Getting Home on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, Libro.fm, and Google Play.