Your Destination Is on the Left Author: Lauren Spieller
Genre: YA Contemporary
Release Date: June 26, 2018
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Description:
Dessa Rhodes is a modern day nomad. Her family travels in an RV, their lives defined by state lines, exit signs, and the small communal caravan they call home.
Among them is Cyrus, her best friend and long-time crush, whom she knows she can never be with. When your families are perpetually linked, it’s too dangerous to take a risk on romance.
Instead, Dessa looks to the future. She wants to be a real artist and going to art school is her ticket to success and a new life. There’s just one problem: she hasn’t been accepted...anywhere. Suddenly her future is wide open, and it looks like she’s going to be stuck traveling forever.
Then an unexpected opportunity presents itself: an internship working with a local artist in Santa Fe. Dessa struggles to prove to her boss — and herself — that she belongs there, but just as she finally hits her stride, her family suffers an unexpected blow. Faced with losing everything that she has worked for, Dessa has a difficult decision to make. Will she say goodbye to her nomadic lifestyle and the boy she loves?
Or will she choose to never stop moving?
Inspiration behind the book:
The idea for Your Destination Is On The Left came to me a few weeks after I moved to New York in 2014. My husband and I hauled a trailer full of our stuff all the way from California, and we were exhausted from the trip. I was no stranger to long drives since I'd driven across from CA to the midwest many times, but the trip to New York was by far the longest.
I started to think about how difficult it would be to drive for more than a week, which made me think of one of the original 'road trip' stories — The Odyssey. That got me thinking...what if I did a retelling of The Odyssey, but instead of it being about Odysseus, it was about a Greek-American teenager named Dessa? And instead of traveling home after the fall of Troy, she was a nomad, living in an RV caravan, traveling the United States? And what if, instead of battling the monsters of mythology, she was forced to contend with her own personal demons? Before long I was rereading Homer’s epic and researching RV life, not to mention all the wonderful places along Route 66.
Three years later, the book has changed a lot — it’s really more inspired by The Odyssey than it is a retelling, and there's quite a bit more romance in Your Destination than in Homer's tale — but I owe a lot to that long trip across the country, the snacks I ate along the way, and to Homer!
Lauren
Spieller is a literary agent who lives in New York with her husband.
When she isn’t writing, she can be found drinking lattes, pining for
every dog she sees, or visiting her native California. YOUR DESTINATION
IS ON THE LEFT is her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter
@laurenspieller.
Hardcover copy of THE DESTINATION IS ON YOUR LEFT by Lauren Spieller
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