Book stop:

Hit the Road

by Michele Regenold

Brit’s summer starts with a thud. She’s had her driver’s license for 11 days, but she has no car to drive. Her parents have dumped her at her 86-year-old grandmother’s house for 2 weeks while they go on vacation, and Nannie, Brit’s grandmother, doesn’t have a car either. Brit’s mother had decided Nannie was too old to drive, so she cut up Nannie’s license and sold her Caddy.

But Nannie has other plans, including a road trip with 3 pals to their 65th college reunion. Oh, and they’ll need to kidnap one of Nannie’s friends from a nursing home. Brit will just have to come along.

Brit is less than thrilled—until a car rental company delivers a GMC Safari to Nannie for her road trip. Then Brit is alarmed.

Nannie is too short and too frail to drive the van. Brit knows perfectly well that it’s illegal for her to drive it—she’s too young—but who else is there?

So Brit and Nannie’s road trip adventure begins and speeds along at a quick pace. Brit has to negotiate big city, high-speed traffic, all while answering her mother’s call on her cell.

Brit “twitched herself but didn’t feel a phone resting in a pants pocket, so, leaning to her right, she kept the wheel steady with her left hand and fished around the inside of her backpack with her right hand, at sixty-five miles per hour while passing. I’m an awesome driver, she thought, feeling the little oblong of her beloved cell phone.

“Then she noticed she was actually going eight-seven and was about to drive into the trunk of the car in front of her.”

Cooney has created a funny road trip novel about a teenager just learning to drive and 4 elderly women with decades of driving experience.