Wrong Highway

Author: Wendy Gordon

Publisher: Shepherdess Books

Release Date: June 15, 2016

Rating: 4 Stars

Reviewer: Jessica Higgins

Set in 1980’s Long Island, Wrong Highway gives new meaning to the term, “dysfunctional family.”

I received a complimentary copy of this book through TLC book tours for an honest and fair review. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

 Wrong Highway follows Erica Richards and her family who live in West Meadow, Long Island in the mid-1980s.  She has three boys and a new baby girl.  She stays home with the kids while her husband works on Wall Street.  Her relationship with her sister, Debbie is strained on many levels.  Debbie has one son, Jared, who has many problems, the least of which is his lack of respect and concern for her.  Ron, Debbie’s husband is hard on Jared who ends up turning to his aunt for support.  This leads him and Erica down a highway to drugs and other problems.  One turns leads to another and before long Erica finds herself on a highway she never intended to be on with little idea how to turn around and find the right road.

This was a very interesting and quick read. While I didn’t agree with the actions of the characters, a mom with a newborn doing drugs, the way they were written made them seem as if all this was their natural course of action.  Every family has problems, but here we see those problems brought out and exaggerated to an extreme level.  It was easy to find certain characters dislikable and others I found myself agreeing with their course of action.  Having grown up in the 80’s, I enjoyed going back to that decade for the duration of the story.  Everything was well placed and correlated with the time period written.  The plot was nothing big but the best thing the author did was really develop the characters so that when they were speaking or doing something, their actions seemed right for them at that time.  I’m trying to come up with other negatives for the writing but not much comes to mind.  The writing itself was well done but there were parts I didn’t particularly enjoy, a little bit of language and the drug use, but it was an overall enjoyable read and the end seemed to just end in not the best way  I felt a little more effort could have been applied to tie up the end a little neater .

I would recommend this book for mature readers.