Book Review: Dear Pen Pal (The Mother-Daughter Book Club, #3) by Heather Vogel Frederick

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Dear Pen Pal (The Mother-Daughter Book Club, #3)  by Heather Vogel Frederick  is the third book in a middle grade book series that is being rereleased. Chaos erupts in this third installment as the daughters in the book club get themselves into trouble. Each of the girls have big changes in their lives:  Jess is going to boarding school; Megan's grandmother comes to live with her; Emma starts a campaign against school uniforms; Cassidy has a lot of unexpected change coming to her family. Will the mother daughter book club stay together? I'd like to thank NetGalley, Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of Dear Pen Pal  by Heather Vogel Frederick with it's upcoming rerelease to the public. I always love a good book that involves books, even if its target audience is children between the ages of eight and twelve. It wasn't until I reached the end of the book that I realized that it...
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Book Review: The Hitchhikers by Chevy Stevens

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NetGalley ARC Book Review of The Hitchhikers by Chevy Stevens
A huge thank you goes out to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of The Hitchhikers by Chevy Stevens. I was provided a copy free of charge in exchange for my honest review, and I was ecstatic about it because Chevy Stevens is absolutely one of my favorite authors and is a must read in my humble opinion.

The story opens with Alice and Tom, who are husband and wife, taking their newly bought RV from Seattle, Washington and take a road trip through Canada where they will end up at the 1976 Olympics in Toronto. As they pull into their first stop of the trip, a campground, Alice and Tom see a young couple named Simon and Jenny walking in their direction and offer them a ride to the next town. However, the young couple aren't as they seem and take their hosts as their prisoners.

Chevy Stevens, a Canadian author, does not disappoint with her latest novel aptly named The Hitchhikers. From page one of this story, I was immediately sucked into the worlds of Alice, Tom, Simon, and Jenny, and boy, oh boy, was I ever taken on the ride of a lifetime. The story works in the year it was set in because I don't think it would've played out like it did if it had been told in the present with all the technology in today's world.

The author did a great job of telling the story from alternating perspectives of the main two female characters, Alice and Jenny. Don't worry, it's not confusing in the least because the story is told in a fluid way picking up where the last character left off. There were plenty of twists and turns, and I found myself fully entranced in the novel and forgetting about the real world going on around me.

Towards the end of the story, Stevens does provide flashbacks of Jenny so that when the end of the story comes, the reader knows exactly what happened before we met both Jenny and Simon. Where as there was one aspect of the story that I expected early on when it came to the baby, I didn't quite anticipate anything else and was shocked.

My rating of The Hitchhikers by Chevy Stevens is a resounding five out five stars, and I'm still thinking about the book days later. This will definitely be a book that I recommend to my friends, family, and members of the two book clubs I belong to.

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