The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary

I usually have a hard time spotting a co-dependent relationship, I was blindsided when I wrote one and someone called it out. There is a fine line between needing someone because you are meant to be together and making them the reason to live. Dylan needs Addie. She defines him. She is how he identifies. He is not a man, a poet, a wanderer. He is the before, during, and after -Addie- being. And he knows that he is not good without her.

I didn’t get it, their need for each other. It felt more like a crutch and less like a healthy relationship. And though the book implies that they are starting over and are going to establish healthier patterns, that did not seem to be happening during the road trip.

Dylan walks out on Addie because he believes she betrayed him, and without her, he cannot go on. Here I need to digress and mention that clinical depression and the conversation around it, particularly in men, is not commonly had. It’s wildly stigmatized and I loved that this book was working to break that stigma. People suffer from depression and they should not feel like they cannot tell their partners about it and the book reminds us of that fact very well.

But, Addie and Dylan have many more issues, far beyond his depressive episodes or her need for external validation. We spend a lot of the book learning their flaws and so little time moving past them, that the resolution did not ring true to me.

I wish we could have gotten to the wedding sooner. Spent more time on the finer points of all the excellent progress everyone was making, mentally and emotionally. I wanted that last 10% of the book to have been the last 40%.

Lastly, I found all the side characters to be so much more interesting than Addie and Dylan. I need a whole book about Luke and Javier or Cherry and Krishna. I would read both of those.

Maybe, the inevitability of these two returning to each other made me so disinterested in the details, but something didn’t quite work for me. - Sky