Tough, street-smart, and mouthy, Taylor Jessup has always been the kind of girl who knows exactly how life should be. But it seems the world around her won't cooperate -- she keeps getting involved with the wrong friends, the wrong older man, even the wrong Mr. Right. Her relationship with her family is downright dysfunctional -- while her mother is a holdover from the 1950s, her father embraces the go-go 1970s with abandon. So Taylor, left to her own devices, determines her life's road map -- a plan that will get her out of her house and out of Houston. A plan that will get her somewhere.
The Way to Somewhere
traces Taylor's odyssey as she moves from teenager to woman, with equal parts awkwardness, conflict, and resolve. All the while, Taylor struggles to shape reality into her dreams of the forever after. When a complex romantic entanglement leads to a fascination with furniture restoration, Taylor seems to have found the precise balance of science and logic that she desperately seeks. Yet somehow, her experiences continue to be more surprising and disastrous than smoothly aligned, until eventually all of these wrong turns set her life further on its own true course.
Resonant and moving, funny and wise,
charts Taylor's growth as she flings herself headlong into sex, love, relationships, and renewal. In the end, Taylor's happiness hinges on learning not only to accept but to embrace those elements of her life that she had once tossed aside in search of better things.
With the quick wit of Tom Perrotta's
Bad Haircut
and the emotional timbre of Wally Lamb's
She's Come Undone,
Angie Day's
is an exceptional exploration of that fragile bridge between adolescence and adulthood, and what shores us up -- or breaks us apart.