Along for the Ride (2009) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

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• Auden Penelope West: Auden is the main character of Along for the ride. She grows up with her parents always fighting and she spends nights up at the diner to get away from it all. Auden spends the summer with her dad, step mom Heidi, and her half-sister Thisbe aka Isby.
• Eli Stock: Works at the bike shop. Jake's brother. He and Auden fall in love through out the story.
• Heidi: Auden's stepmom, owns a boutique. Has a newborn daughter named Thisbe, despite her fight to give her daughter a normal name. She has her own store in Colby.
• Maggie: Works at Heidi's boutique, Jake's ex-girlfriend, Leah and Esther's friend, has been accepted into the same college as Auden, biker. Is not who she seems to be at first glance. She is smart and funny sometimes in the book.
• Leah: Works at Heidi's boutique and soon becomes friends with Auden.
• Esther: Works at Heidi's boutique and soon becomes friends with Auden.
• Hollis West: Auden's sweet, funky brother that changes throughout the course of the story
• Wallace: Adam's friend.
• Jake Stock: Eli's younger brother. Enjoys riding bikes. He also enjoys getting girls. Maggie's ex-boyfriend
• Laura: A girl Hollis meets and seems to like more than the others. Very much like his mother. She is a scientist.
• Clyde: Owns the local bike shop and many other small businesses, including a laundromat. Friends with Eli. Aspiring cook/baker.
• Jason Talbot: A boy with whom Auden always competed for valedictorian in high school. He stood her up at prom. Also features in Truth About Forever.
• Thisbe Caroline West: Auden's half sister. Robert and Heidi's daughter. Baby sister of Hollis and Auden.
• Isabel: Heidi's close friend. Mentioned also in What Happened to Goodbye as the mother of McLean.
• Robert West: Auden's father. A novelist who was in the shadow of his first wife. He gets a divorce with Auden's mother and soon is the newly wed husband of Heidi. They have a baby, Thisbe.
• Mrs. Karen Stock: Eli's mother. Good with babies.
• Tara: Hollis's old girlfriend.
• Ray: Coffee shop guy.
• Dr. Victoria West: Auden's mother, who has treated her daughter like an adult since she was three. She is very work driven and has no committed relationships. She likes to party with her students at night now that she is divorced. She doesn't particularly agree with Auden's decision to spend the summer with her father, but once she realizes that the trip has transformed Auden into a better person, she learns to embrace her life and appreciate her daughter. She keeps in contact with Auden and wants updates on her ex, the baby, and Heidi.
• Wanda: Add a description of this character.
• Belissa Norwood: Eli's ex
• Finn
• Adam: likes Maggie. Friend of Jake, Wallace, and Eli.
• Elaine
• Abe: Eli's best friend. He dies but you still hear a lot about him
• Morgan
• Isby: this is Thisbe's nickname given to her by Auden and Hedi
• Thisbe Caroline West: Auden's dad and Hedi's baby; it very young through out the whole book
• Detram Hollis: Auden's brother by blood; son of Auden's mother and father; very 'free' living
• Auden: main character; very smart; is always in the books and getting ahead in school; leaves for the summer to go spend it with her dad and get some time away from her mom which is where we get the setting for most of this story

Quotes edit see section history

• “Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder- if not impossible- to lose.”

  Auden

• “The night changed things, widening out the scope. What we said to each other, the things we did, they all took on a bigger meaning in the dark. Like time was sped up and slowed down all at once.”

  Auden

• “I hadn't realized how much I missed the simplicity of a project of numbers, how things just made sense in sums and divisions. No emotion, no complications. Just digits on a screen lining up in perfect sequence.”

  Auden

• “Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or? We're capable of more than that.”

  Maggie

• “"I guess everyone has that, though, right? That first love. And the first one who breaks your heart. For me, they just happen to be the same person. At least I'm efficient, right?"”

  Maggie

• “And all that pink. It's like a giant vagina in there.”

  Victoria West

• “Relationships don't always make sense. Especially from the outside.”

  Auden

• “You couldn’t just pick and choose at will when someone depended on you, or loved you. It wasn’t like a light switch, easy to shut on or off. If you were in, you were in. Out, you were out. To me, it didn’t seem complicated at all. In fact, it was the simplest thing in the world.”

• “And the bottom line is, what defines you isn’t how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike. As long as it’s one more, you’re all good.”

• “It was so easy to disown what you couldn’t recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.”

• “...it didn’t make you noble to step away from something that wasn’t working, even if you thought you were the reason for the malfunction. Especially then. It just made you a quitter. Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot.”

• “It was terrible and awful when someone left you. You could move on, do the best you could, but like Eli had said, an ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.”

• ““You’re always a kid around your parents,” he replied. “Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance. You know what I’m saying?””

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Maybe the truth was, it shouldn’t be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something’s difficult to come by, you’ll do that much more to make sure it’s even harder—if not impossible—to lose.

  Highlighted by 316 Kindle customers

• it didn’t make you noble to step away from something that wasn’t working, even if you thought you were the reason for the malfunction. Especially then. It just made you a quitter. Because if you were the problem, chances were you could also be the solution. The only way to find out was to take another shot.

  Highlighted by 248 Kindle customers

• “And the bottom line is, what defines you isn’t how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike. As long as it’s one more, you’re all good.”

  Highlighted by 234 Kindle customers

• “Life is full of screwups,” he said, chucking another paper at a split-level before taking the corner. “You’re supposed to fail sometimes. It’s a required part of the human existence.”

  Highlighted by 233 Kindle customers

• It was terrible and awful when someone left you. You could move on, do the best you could, but like Eli had said, an ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.

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• Maybe it was true, and being a girl could be about interest rates and skinny jeans, riding bikes and wearing pink. Not about any one thing, but everything.

  Highlighted by 224 Kindle customers

• You couldn’t just pick and choose at will when someone depended on you, or loved you. It wasn’t like a light switch, easy to shut on or off. If you were in, you were in. Out, you were out. To me, it didn’t seem complicated at all. In fact, it was the simplest thing in the world.

  Highlighted by 204 Kindle customers

• It was so easy to disown what you couldn’t recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.

  Highlighted by 182 Kindle customers

• So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

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• “The basic fact of the matter is that no, this isn’t ideal. Very few things are. Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak. You know?”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

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• Colby, North Carolina: A place where Auden goes to spend the summer with her Dad, step-mom and step-sister, but a place that unexpectedly changes her life forever.
• Park Mart
• Tallyho: The local club in Colby
• New York
• Europe
• Shakespeare
• Last Chance Café: Located in the small town of Colby. Serves burgers the world's best onion rings.

Organizations edit see section history

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• Defriese University: College where Auden plans to go.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Rummaging: to search thoroughly or actively through (a place, receptacle, etc.), esp. by moving around, turning over, or looking through contents.
• Eerie: Chiefly Scot. affected with superstitious fear.
• Vigilant: keenly alert to or heedful of trouble or danger, as while others are sleeping or unsuspicious
• Barbs: a point or pointed part projecting backward from a main point, as of a fishhook or arrowhead.
• Intricate: having many interrelated parts or facets; entangled or involved: an intricate maze.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Sarah Dessen (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• New York Times Bestseller
• Teen Read Awards (Finalist, 2010: Best Read)
• ALA Best Book for Young Adult (2010, #7)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PZ7.D455 Al 2009
• Dewey: Add the Dewey Classification.

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Romantic, younger kids wouldn't understand much.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Teens › Authors, A-Z › ( D ) › Dessen, Sarah
• Books › Teens › Literature & Fiction › Love & Romance

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Sarah Dessen Offical Website- Along for the ride

More Books Like This edit see section history