Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour

by Morgan Matson
343 pages

Amy Curry thinks her life sucks. Her mom decides to move from California to Connecticut to start anew--just in time for Amy's senior year. Her dad recently died in a car accident. So Amy embarks on a road trip to escape from it all, driving cross-country from the home she's always known toward her new life. Joining Amy on the road trip is Roger, the son of Amy's mother's old friend. Amy hasn’t seen him in years, and she is less than thrilled to be driving across the country with a guy she barely knows. So she's surprised to find that she is developing a crush on him. At the same time, she’s coming to terms with her father’s death and how to put her own life back together after the accident. Told in traditional narrative as well as scraps from the road--diner napkins, motel receipts, postcards--this is the story of one girl's journey to find herself.

After I saw Chelsea’s review, I knew I had to read this, and soon. It was so cute. Road trips + awesome music + a scrapbook + not obviously falling in love (as Chelsea so accurately stated) = the most epic read :)

Long John Silver: Volume 2: Neptune

by Xavier Dorison (story) and Mathieu Lauffray (art), 50 pages

Events take even darker turns (and things were plenty dark to begin with) as the body count rises and tensions aboard ship reach--and then pass--the breaking point. Silver is not a good man. He is not a hero. And he will most likely be the cause of his own (and many others') unnecessary destruction in the end. But even self-loathing, money-loving, peg-legged pirates have soft spots. Good luck to the unwise man who thinks Silver's weakness is his own strength.

Yeesh. Dude had it comin'.

Uncomfortable to read in places and not always pretty, but the twisted story and atmospheric art pull you in and make you watch out for the next one, anyway.

Long John Silver: Volume 1: Lady Vivian Hastings

by Xavier Dorison (story) and Mathieu Lauffray (art), 56 pages

Years after the events of Stevenson's Treasure Island, literature's most famous peg-legged pirate agrees to a bold lady's request to help her fill out a ship's crew in order to double-cross her cold-hearted, neglectful, fortune hunter of a husband--for a share of the spoils, of course. But they'll have to make it through the adventure alive first.

Nobody's slate is clean and no one's motives pure in this grown-up semi-sequel inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's classic. Jen H's earlier review piqued my interest, and now I'm hooked, too. It's dark and moody and the lush art easily conveys tone and temperature through skillful use of color and perspective: snow on the dirty streets is bitterly cold, the fireside of an apartment a little dangerously toasty, the winter sun weak through the tall windows of a loveless mansion. Neatness. I need to read the next one soon!