Title: Reunited Author: Hilary Weisman Graham
Published: June 12, 2012
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 325
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Alice, Summer, and Tiernan are ex-best friends.
Back in middle school, the three girls were inseparable. They were also the number one fans of the rock band Level3.
But when the band broke up, so did their friendship. Summer ran with the popular crowd, Tiernan was a rebellious wild-child, and Alice spent high school with her nose buried in books.
Now, just as the girls are about to graduate, Level3 announces a one-time-only reunion show.
Even though the concert’s 2000 miles away, Alice buys three tickets on impulse. And as it turns out, Summer and Tiernan have their own reasons for wanting to get out of town. Good thing Alice’s graduation gift (a pea-green 1976 VW camper van known as the Pea Pod) is just the vehicle to get them there.
But on the long drive cross-country, the girls hit more than a few bumps in the road. Will their friendship get an encore or is the show really over?
I think there’s a line where “fun read” becomes “ridiculous read”, and Reunited most definitely crossed that line. Graham’s story about a three girls driving halfway across the United States to see their favorite band had a lot of potential, but the gimmicky, soap-opera style of storytelling was hard to stomach.
As I said, my biggest issue with Reunited was the plotline. It was very over the top, very clichéd, and to me felt very fake, almost like the author was trying too hard to write a quirky yet heartfelt story about friendship. If you’re the kind of reader who’s okay with spending an entire chapter dealing with a funeral for a road-killed squirrel, or is willing to view a creepy interlude with a potential rapist as comic relief…then this book just might work for you. Sadly, squirrel funerals and hilarious rapists are not things I particularly care for.
The difficult three-way friendship Graham deals with in this book left something to be desired as well. I thought the main characters, Alice, Tiernan, and Summer, had a very definite The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants vibe, in that they were unlikely friends who filled definite stereotypes. Over the course of high school, they drifted apart because of something terrible that happened freshman year. Anyway. I never really felt the connection between the girls. For me, I thought they were fun, interesting people, but their friendship seemed very stale and obvious. I thought perhaps the author was trying to force things.
I wasn’t too impressed with Graham’s writing either. It definitely could have used editing and polishing. I think the phrase “a bad Southern accent” was used no less than five times a chapter, which is excessive. I think this author’s prose is very dull, and that only served to further highlight to over the top stereotypes that Reunited is positively brimming with.
Really, this book is too wacky, relies on too many convenient coincidences, and didn’t deliver as far as characterization and friendship themes were concerned. I think Reunited is a decent attempt from a debut novelist, but there’s better material out there, so I’d be hesitant to recommend this to anyone in general.
