#BroaderBookshelf 2022 - Road Trip!

After her mother leaves home suddenly, thirteen-year-old Sal and her grandparents take a car trip retracing her mother's route. Along the way, Sal recounts the story of her friend Phoebe, whose mother also left.

When Leah's former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah her red sports car, Leah takes off to San Francisco to claim the car, revisiting past lives and loves in a self she abandoned years ago.

When Chloe Pierce's mom forbids her to apply for a spot at the dance conservatory of her dreams, she devises a secret plan to drive two hundred miles to the nearest audition. But Chloe hits her first speed bump when her annoying neighbor Eli insists upon hitching a ride, threatening to tell Chloe's mom if she leaves him and his smelly dog, Geezer, behind. So now Chloe's chasing her ballet dreams down the east coast--two unwanted (but kinda cute) passengers in her car, butterflies in her stomach, and a really dope playlist on repeat. Filled with roadside hijinks, heart-stirring romance, and a few broken rules, I WANNA BE WHERE YOU ARE is a YA debut perfect for fans of Jenny Han and Sandhya Menon.--Provided by publisher.

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

Set in the deep South, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, and surprisingly funny novel that follows an unnamed narrator as he comes of age under the care of his aunt and uncle — who are werewolves.

Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy.

"From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family's summer road trip across America--a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today. A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo--and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera--the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure--both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images--including prior stories of migration and displacement--Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. Blending the personal and the political with astonishing empathy, it is a powerful, wholly original work of fiction: exquisite, provocative, and deeply moving"-- Provided by publisher.

Presents a journal describing one man's journey of self-discovery and his quest for the ultimate truth of existence.

Ray Midge is tracking down his wife, Norma, who has run off with her first husband, by following credit card receipts (his credit card!). Midge starts out in Norma's lover's compact car, which has seventy-four thousand miles on it and a quarter-turn slack in the steering wheel (they took his Ford Torino!). The trail leads from Arkansas, down to Mexico, and into Honduras, where Midge stops to help, and of course gets entangled with, Dr. Reo Symes in his broken down bus, "The Dog of the South." Symes is a pure Portis character-a crazily optimistic dreamer obsessed with secret knowledge and with one John Selmer Dix, the elusive writer of inspirational books for salesmen. As Midge chases Norma and Symes and tries to sort the true from the false Dix sightings, Portis spins an extraordinary novel that addresses with comic eloquence the deep longing of the American psyche for things just to make some sense.

"When his dream of the perfect marriage, the perfect son, and the perfect life implodes, a Wall Street millionaire takes a cross-country bus trip in search of his college sweetheart and ideals of youth. Myopic, narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his 3 year-old-son's diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart, whom he hasn't seen or spoken to in years. Meanwhile, reeling from the fight that caused Barry's departure, his super-smart wife Seema--a driven first-generation American who craved a picture-perfect life, with all the accoutrements of a huge bank account--has her own demons to face. How these two imperfect characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is the heart of this biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times"-- Provided by publisher.

Records the experiences of a free-lance writer who embarked on a zany journey into the drug culture.

"In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a 'road bum,' an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador - a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live - a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off."--Provided by publisher.

Follows the adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft in the mid-nineteenth century.

"Find Me is the story of a young woman reckoning with the ghosts of her past in a post-epidemic America"-- Provided by publisher.

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day.