The Long Ride Home
by Tawni Waters
This story is a heart tugging one. Harley, the narrator of the story, loses her mom and then goes on a journey to try to find closure. There are very real situations, thoughts, and feelings you experience with her along the way. And then it comes to an end, and it’s NOT the ending you expect. I still don’t quite know how I feel about the way it ended. It’s a real life ending I suppose. You usually expect either the best outcome or the worst outcome when it comes to book endings – this one doesn’t really fall into either typical expectation. That’s about as much as I can say about the ending without ruining it in case you give it a whirl.
And then there is the boyfriend Dean. Every YA book has to have a love interest. There was a lot of detail given on Dean’s personality, but I still had a hard time picturing him. I almost always get a visual in my mind of a main character in a book, and this is the first book in a long time I actually couldn’t picture the characters. But even without a mental image, I still felt for his character. I think at times I felt for him more than the main character. In the chapters where he wasn’t present, I found myself wondering about him more than one would expect.
“I don’t understand life and death. How could I? I’m a tiny speck of a human on a minuscule dot of a planet in a universe bigger than my ability to comprehend. How could my pea-brain possibly grasp the meaning of existence? Still, when I listen to my heart it knows a soul as beautiful as hers couldn’t just up and vanish.”
About The Author: Tawni Waters
Tawni Waters is a writer, actor, college teacher, and gypsy. Her debut novel, Beauty of the Broken, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2014. In addition to winning the prestigious. Her YA novel, The Long Ride Home, published by Sourcebooks Fire, launched in September, 2017. She teaches workshops and retreats at various universities and conferences throughout the U.S and Mexico. In her spare time she talks to angels, humanely evicts spiders from her floorboards, and plays Magdalene to a minor rock god.
Continue Reading…
Article originally Published in the October/November 2019 Issue “Read Global”