Eve Prince is done—with college, with her mom, with guys, and with her dream of fashion design. But when her best friend goes MIA, Eve must gather together the broken threads of her life in order to search for her. When Eve’s grandmother, Boop, a retiree dripping with Southern charm, finds out about the trip, she—desperate to see her sister, and also hoping to alleviate Eve’s growing depression—hijacks her granddaughter’s road trip. Boop knows from experience that healing Eve will require more than flirting lessons and a Garlic Festival makeover. Nevertheless, Boop is frustrated when her feeble efforts yield the same failure that her sulfur-laced sip from the Fountain of Youth wrought on her age. She knows that sharing the secret that’s haunted her for sixty years might be the one thing that will lessen Eve’s growing depression—but she also fears that if she reveals it, she’ll lose her family and her own hard-won happiness. Boop and Eve’s journey through the heart of Dixie is an unforgettable love story between a grandmother and her granddaughter.
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A rich blend of Southern charm and interwoven family relationships, this novel by first-time author Mary Helen Sheriff centers around- you guessed it – a road trip! This one is from Florida through Virginia and follows Eve, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood but still living under her mother Justine's thumb, and Boop, her feisty, funny, yet ultimately complex grandmother. Swirling around these two are Justine and Victoria, Boop's sister, and Ally, Eve's best friend and cousin, who's gone missing. What initially seems like a fun adventure quickly becomes something more, as Eve struggles to follow her own dreams even if it means breaking her mother's heart and Boop wrestles with whether to reveal the secret she's kept from her family for decades. Interspersed with amusing Southern sayings and laugh-old-loud scenes of Boop trying to get Eve to embrace her true self, are weighty themes of depression, mental illness, and birth defects. These characters argue at the drop of a hat, and honest communication sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, but ultimately we see there's a lot of love hiding behind the masks they present to the world and by the end, each has grown into a truer, more resilient, and better version of themselves.
I was given an ARC in exchange for an honest review of the book.
