I recently finished The Flatshare, and it sent me on a rom-com reading spree. When I came across Beth O’Leary’s newest book, I was thrilled. A second chance relationship while being forced together on a road trip? Sign me up!

And then.

This book was not the light and fluffy read I was expecting. The book delved into serious topics and didn’t hit the mark on covering them well. Marcus is completely insufferable. Overall, I couldn’t find myself caring about any of the characters except a desire for them to disappear. By the end, I wasn’t rooting for Addie and Dylan at all.

Content Warning: sexual assault, depression, emotional abuse

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary was a a really great read.

This story centers around Addie and Dylan in past and present timelines.

In the present timeline, Addie and Dylan are on their way to a mutual friends wedding and they wind up being forced to carpool on the way. Having broken up two years prior, the ride is more than a little awkward. The last timelines chronic their relationship from start to finish.

This story covers some deep topics and isn’t necessarily a light, fun read. It is emotional and heartfelt.

I really enjoyed the dual perspectives and dual timelines. This made the story highly engaging.

Addie and Dylan were both enjoyable narrators. I liked reading the story from both of their perspectives. I admired Addie for her spunkiness and strength. I also appreciated Dylan and the personal growth he experienced in the story.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. I liked that it was more serious in nature and wasn’t super cutesy.

THE ROAD TRIP took a while for me to get into it. It’s very dry and has British humor and some British phrases which slowed it down for me. The story is told in alternating chapters by Addie or Dylan, and some of the story is prefaced as Then or Now. A lot of back and forth between past and present also made it difficult to get into, but we do learn about the main character’s pasts, when they unexpectedly met and became lovers in Provence. As the story begins, they are ex-lovers with baggage.

The story does pick up, however, and has some laugh-out-loud moments due to the unexpectedness of their road trip. Addie and her sister are traveling from England to Scotland along with another wedding guest, who they had met online on the wedding blog. Things take a drastic turn when they get in a car accident with Dylan and his friend, causing them to all squeeze into one vehicle to get to their friend’s wedding.

On the way, we learn about the characters dealing with depression, dysfunction, and chaos when Dylan’s friend tries to come between him and Addie. Though some of the characters leave a lot to be desired, there are lovely descriptions of the wedding venue and the villa in Provence.

This is a second chance at love story. And it’s filled with friends reconnecting and dealing with their own issues as well as building relationships. Will Addie and Dylan’s feelings from several years before be enough to get them back on track? THE ROAD TRIP delivers closure and a lovely ending, though it came off as a bit abrupt to me.

THE ROAD TRIP is an enjoyable read that takes some time to get going, and the characters have some real issues to handle before finding their happily-ever-after.

I rated the book 3.5 stars but rounded to 4 stars on Goodreads.

A joint review appeared on Dear Author, here is an excerpt:

Jennie: The story is told alternately in present day and in flashbacks, and alternately by the protagonists, Addie and Dylan. In the present day, Addie and her sister Deb are driving to Scotland to their friend Cherry’s wedding. They have a passenger, Rodney, a co-worker of Cherry’s who asked for a lift on the wedding’s Facebook page.

The group hasn’t gotten very far when they’re rear-ended by a car that happens to be driven by Addie’s ex, Dylan. Dylan is headed to the wedding with his best friend Marcus, but now his car is too damaged to drive. Somehow, despite the extreme awkwardness of circumstances, Dylan and Marcus end up in the car (a tight fit!) with Addie, Deb and Rodney.

Janine: They are a motley crew. Addie, a schoolteacher who’s twenty-five, has regained equilibrium and attained a measure of self-confidence in the twenty months that followed a devastating breakup with Dylan. Dylan, a twenty-six-year-old English lit graduate student/aspiring poet from a posh background, is still pining for her. Deb, Addie’s biracial half-sister (all the other characters except Cherry’s fiancé, Krishna, who has an Indian background, are white as far as I can tell), is a new, intentionally single mother who gives zero fucks for anyone’s opinion and can’t stand Marcus. Marcus, Dylan’s privileged, sarcastic asshole best friend since childhood, picks on Rodney, who is awkward, clueless, and has no friends.

I have to be honest, I was not convinced I was going to like this book for the first 20-25%, but I’m so glad I stuck with it because I ended up really enjoying it. Some things that I really didn’t like: Addie continuously being described as “tiny”, references to 2000's country music, and Dylan’s poetry. These are all things that I just didn’t like personally, and for the first quarter of the book they had me rolling my eyes. While I still hate that Addie was described as tiny every two seconds, I’ll admit that Dylan’s poetry and the country references ended up growing on me. By the end of the book, I had listened to way too many 2000's country playlists on Spotify.

The Road Trip is a dual point of view romance about Addie and Dylan. The story follows two timelines. The first timeline follows Addie and Dylan in the present. Addie and Dylan are exes with breakup baggage. Both Addie and Dylan are on their own respective road trips, heading to the same friends wedding. Addie is traveling with her sister Deb, and Rodney, another wedding guest that needed a ride. Dylan is with his friend Marcus. After an accident occurs, the two groups start traveling together. The other timeline follows Addie and Dylan in the past, starting with the two meeting, the relationship that follows, and their eventual breakup.

As I mentioned, at first I wasn't vibing with this, but as I carried on with the story I ended up really loving the characters and the two timelines the book follows. I’m always wary of road trip books because they can be done really well or just be really boring. The Road Trip, in my opinion, was done well. Addie, Dylan, Marcus, Deb, and Rodney and their shenanigans were fun to follow. I also think mixing the road trip timeline with the timeline following the characters in the past made it so that everything came together really well. When I finished this story, all I could think about was how much I would love another book with these characters. Beth O’Leary created a great cast of interesting and complex characters. I liked Deb and Marcus (sometimes) almost as much as I liked Addie and Dylan. O’Leary could definitely follow up with Deb or Marcus’s story and I’d pick it up right away.

I’d recommend this book to:
-road trip trope lovers
-readers who like seeing couples come back together
-lovers of a good group of characters with interesting dynamics
-anyone who loved Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation this year (the stories are different, but have similar enough elements that if you like one I think you’d like the other)

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley for the ARC copy of this book, given in exchange for an honest review.

DNF this 20% in. This did not feel like a Beth O'Leary book to me. I read and enjoyed both The Switch and The Flatshare. But I could not get into this book. It was just page after page of nonsense! I HATED Marcus as a character and could not care about the senseless chatter.

Nothing happened for the first 50 pages that had any weight to it. I really did not like the THEN parts of the book but the NOW parts were not even better. I was going to continue but the more irritated and bored I got the less interested I became. This is just no my cup of tea. I looked at other reviews thinking it might inspire me to keep going but I did not find anything to keep me interested in reading. I know that the ending has some controversial opinions and from what I know happens I would NOT have been okay with how Dylan handled everything.

Thank you Netgalley and Berkley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley and Berkley Publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review (note that the book is released at the time I got around to reading/reviewing)

There were parts of this story I enjoyed, even some parts that made me laugh out loud, but overall I was just bored during most of it.

What I didn't like:
-The pacing of this story felt off to me. The book interchanges between past and present perspective, which I liked, but I felt like some of the "past" sections were randomly thrown in and didn't make sense where they were placed.
-Marcus, the main male character's best friend, was a frustrating character to read about. What I mean by that is it felt like the author had a lot of plans of what she wanted to do with his character, but instead of picking one thing and sticking to it, she threw it all together in a big jumble. I couldn't tell what his motivations were and whether or not I was supposed to like him. Even after finishing the book and learning the truth about Marcus (which was a pretty obvious reveal), I still couldn't figure out if he is someone I'm supposed to root for or not. Sometimes characters like that work in a book, but I don't think it worked in this case.
-Too many characters doing too many things. Again, it seemed like the author had a plan and reason for introducing some characters, and then she changed directions and forgot about them. It ended up being too much. I'm all for some fun side characters (which there were some) but I think this story would have flowed better without the long tangents about the extremely minor characters. It made it seem like they were going to have more importance to the overall story, but they didn't. It's very possible there's going to be a spinoff book in the series, and the author was setting up for that, but by itself it was just too much.

What I liked:
-There were some really funny, laugh-out-loud moments in this book that I really enjoyed. I think the 5 main characters on the actual road trip had great interactions and the present chapters following them were my favorite to read about.
-The main characters had good chemistry and I was rooting for them, even if I was bored throughout. I still wanted to see them reach their HEA.
-The writing style made it easy to read this book. I've read The Flatshare and my biggest critique with that was the writing style. So it was a very pleasant surprise to find this book written differently and in a way that was much easier to read.

Overall:
Didn't hate it, didn't love it. I probably wouldn't read it again, but I did mostly enjoy it while I was reading it.

One of my least favorite tropes in romance is when there's a mix-up/break-up due to a lack of communication. Considering the subject matter for WHY Addie and Dylan broke up, I truly hated the lack of communication. Not even giving someone a chance to explain things and then being sorry about it years later, it just really put a bitter taste in my mouth. While I liked their meet cute and the build up of their initial relationship, the present day car ride was just one big mess after mess and it got old fast. I didn't even care about these characters after a while and thought the book went on for too long.

The Gist: After a terrible break-up, Addie and Dylan find themselves on a road trip together two years later.

My Thoughts: I had high hopes for this one. I usually love a second-chance romance, and road trips are one of my favorite ways to get to know people. But this was kind of a miss for me. The biggest reason? I think Addie and Dylan should have stayed broken up.

I could not have cared less for Dylan’s rich-boy, poor-me attitude. Like, sorry you’re depressed while you TRAVEL THE WORLD. Spare me. Like Addie, I also couldn’t tolerate the way he let such a terrible person like Marcus walk all over him. And the ultimate reason they broke up? Yeah, I would never have spoken to him ever again.

Addie as a character was fine, but she definitely wasn’t the sexy and mysterious being these dudes kept making her out to be?? And why did O’Leary feel the need to keep harping on how small and skinny and fae-like she was?? Like that’s a unique concept in romance??

I did really enjoy Deb and Cherry, and there were some fun moments here. But overall couldn’t get past the fact that I hated the dudes SO MUCH.

The Road Trip was the perfect balance of light and fluffy romance and darker themes that most women face. I highly recommend!

3.5 stars

TW: alcoholism and drug abuse; sexual assault; emotional abuse from parents; stalking

As you can likely tell from the TW list, this book had way more heavy content than I was expecting from a second chance romance. The book is told from both POVs in both the present and past that leads us through the relationship, how it fell apart, and how they got to present day. The problem I ran into was there weren’t enough good times in the past to get me to believe that these two would continue to be so drawn to each other. They have a fun fling turned relationship in the summer when they first meet, but there are glaring red flags even back then and throughout their relationship we mostly see what is keeping them apart rather than what is keeping them together. I still pulled for them ultimately, but less so than if we had more of an established healthier dynamic at some point in the beginning.

This book will definitely still be good for readers who enjoy harder hitting topics in their romance but less so for romance readers looking for pure fluffy escapism. As a lover of both varieties, this still ultimately worked for me overall.

Fans of The Flatshare by this same author will not find the same lighthearted, low stakes romance that lovely book had. This is about at least one destroyed relationship and people who haven't spoken to each other being forced together for a road trip to a friend's wedding. It really isn't a romance at all; it is much more about figuring out why and how everything fell apart. I usually like rotating narration but found myself having to go back to be reminded of the narrator (somehow Dylan and Addie sound too similar) - there are some hijinks but also some serious damage and

My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC of this book available to me.

Circumstances cause our not-happy couple to be thrown back together after two years apart. Five people crammed into a tiny car, attempting to get to a wedding that was hours away. Of course, lots of things go wrong. And flashbacks show us how the couple met, fell in love, moved in together, fell apart, and ended up on a road trip to hell.

If you enjoyed this author's previous books, this one will be right up your alley.

Addie has been looking forward to spending some quality time with her sister heading to a wedding in Scotland for her college roommate. They begin the road trip armored with the best snacks and an incredible playlist when they get into an accident with none other than her ex boyfriend, Dylan and his best friend who also happen to be heading to the same wedding. Addie and her sister feel obligated to give them a ride since their car is out of commission. This sounds like a great set up for a Romcom and I wanted to love this story. I loved the flashbacks describing how Dylan and Addie got together. There was an immediate attraction and the chemistry was wonderful. As the story progressed and more of Dylan's story and his toxic relationship with his best friend Marcus is revealed I was just not as invested anymore. I understand trying to figure yourself out and sticking with your friends but this was just unrelatable to me. I wanted to love the story because it had so much potential but I just ended up liking it. There are some really funny parts and some very heart breaking moments but I just wanted more from the story.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

This was everything I expect at this point from O'Leary. She writes beautiful characters, realistic relationships, and excellent side characters. I burned with second hand embarrassment more than once and could relate to almost every character (Kevin....) out there. This was sweet, and sad, and just so good.

Highly recommend.

Addie and Dylan met four years ago while staying at a friend’s villa in Provence. They had an instant connection and a whirlwind romance filled with miscommunication. Now, they have been broken up for a year and a half. While on the way to a mutual friend’s wedding, they end up having a car accident, totaling Dylan’s car. Dylan and his friend Marcus don’t have any other way to get to the wedding, which is an eight hour drive to Scotland. Addie and her sister Deb end up offering to drive Dylan and Marcus, along with Rodney, who is another guest who needs a ride to the wedding. As Dylan and Addie are forced to spend this road trip together, they must re-examine their relationship and figure out what went wrong.

This is another wonderful romance by Beth O’Leary. I couldn’t help but fall in love with Addie and Dylan. They’re both such passionate people in their own ways. Addie loves fiercely and Dylan is a hopeless romantic. Deb and Marcus were great contrasts to Addie and Dylan, both ready to shut the other down if they think they’re making the wrong choice. Rodney was also a hilarious random addition to the road trip.

This story alternated between Addie’s and Dylan’s perspectives, and between the timelines of their past relationship and the road trip happening now. I found the road trip to be a hilarious comedy of errors. Things kept going wrong in the best ways. These kinds of road trips are only funny in hindsight or when they aren’t happening to you, but they are fun to read about. The other narrative of their past relationship had a much more serious tone. There were lots of heavy feelings, like when they fell in love and when they broke up. There were also some tougher storylines, such as alcohol abuse and sexual assault. I kept finding myself waiting to get to the present narrative because it was more comedic. With the serious tone balanced with the funny moments, this story has something for everyone.

The Road Trip is the perfect summer read!

Thank you Berkley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have been a fan of Beth O’Leary’s books since reading The Flatshare and The Switch. I was excited to be selected to be a part of the Berkley Buddy Read for The Road Trip.

Synopsis:
Addie and her best friend are headed to Scotland for their friend Cherry’s wedding, when she’s rear-ended by none other than her ex Dylan and his friend Marcus. Since they are all headed to the same place, the decision was made for everyone to ride together. Addie and Dylan faced many roadblocks leading to the abrupt ending of their relationship, two years ago. This road trip makes them face new face actual roadblock after roadblock as they slowly make their way to the wedding. If something could go wrong, it probably did.

I appreciated getting the back story of the ended relationship and the dual timelines. As the story went on, I felt the book started to drag and the characters felt somewhat underdeveloped. I liked the characters, but never felt the connection as I did in O’Leary’s previous novels. It was my not my favorite O’Leary novel, but it was still okay. I look forward to future books by this author.

3.5 Stars - Rounding to 4 for Goodreads

Thank you to @netgalley and @berkleypub for a copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

Normally I would DNF a book but this time I pushed through and finished because I hoped that it would get better. I loved The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. It was definitely one of my favourites from 2019. I was so excited about this one because I love road trip books.

Oh my goodness all of these characters are terrible and super annoying people. It had to be one of the most toxic friendship groups I’ve ever read about. They were written as very entitled and dramatic people but at the same time their world was supposed to be normal and you were supposed to feel sorry for them but like they were awful and even though no one deserves to have terrible parents or things happen to them, I felt like the second I felt empathy towards one of them, they would just be so awful that I would forget what had happened and get confused.

There were so many side characters that for some reason had a huge story and you thought okay so their character is important but like no, they would disappear just as fast as they came into the story.

I did not feel like Addie and Dylan had had any sort of deep once in a lifetime love at all for any of it. I could easily foresee all their issues from the get go and like I feel they will always have those issues.

While I love a road trip element I feel like this one was way too long like no one has that many things happen to them on one road trip, it was sort of unrealistic after a while.

I am really trying to find one thing that I liked but I really don’t know. If I wasn’t sent this book for review I probably would have stopped very quickly.

I am very grateful for @berkleyromance and @berkleypub for sending this my way.

Beth O'Leary has become one of my favorite romance authors, and while The Road Trip was not as lighthearted and warm as her previous two novels, I still immensely enjoyed reading about Addie and Dylan. The Road Trip is a novel about second chances, forgiveness, and learning from past mistakes. This novel is perfect for any reader who is looking for a story with complex and flawed characters who are struggling to forgive each other and grow into better versions of themselves. Fair warning that the novel touches on some serious topics such as mental health, sexual assault, and manipulative behavior, but Beth O'Leary writes in such a way that you truly feel great compassion for these characters' journeys into better versions of themselves. I found myself amused by the lighthearted, comedic moments presented by the strange road trip situation, but I also enjoyed getting to read a story about characters that felt real and complicated. I felt Beth O'Leary did well in writing realistic characters who might not by perfect but do a good job of learning from the bad choices they might have made and learning to ask for forgiveness and give it in return.

3.5 stars
Addie and her sister Deb, and an odd guy named Rodney, head out on a road top to attend a friend's wedding in Northern Scotland. They have not traveled far when their Mini Cooper is rear-ended by her ex-boyfriend Dylan, who, along with his best mate, Marcus, is on the way to the same wedding. Miraculously, the Mini remains drivable. The other car is totaled and towed to the nearest repair shop leaving Dylan and Marcus stranded. Despite a horrible breakup, Addie agrees to give Dylan and Marcus a ride to the wedding. Five adults plus their luggage cram into the Mini and continue the 300 miles toward Scotland.

Through alternating POVs of Addie and Dylan combined with dual timelines, we learn their back story and what drove them apart. As expected, the car ride is physically uncomfortable, the conversation is awkward, and the air full of tension. They suffer a series of ludicrous mishaps that threatens their on-time arrival at the wedding venue. It seems as if the longer they drive, the farther they are from their destination.

Addie and Dylan still have sparks between them, much to the concern of Deb and Marcus—but for different reasons.

I had high hopes for this book and while it held my interest, a few things missed the mark for me. The shifts between the 'now' and 'then' timelines were sometimes confusing. At times, the 'then' segments seemed to drag for me, possibly because the 'now' situation was more over-the-top and entertaining.

The cover of the book implies this will be a lighthearted read but the second half takes a turn into some heavy and difficult subject matter.

If you enjoy second chance love stories, give this book a try