The Trail to You and Me - After Thoughts
My thoughts after reading The Trail to You and Me by Mandi Lynn Bell.
9/5/20232 min read
Check out this book!
The Trail to You and Me by Mandi Lynn Bell is an engaging romantic comedy with a dash of adventure. To be transparent, I am not a romance fan. It is my least favorite genre. However, I put it in my reading mix because I am always on the hunt for more books to add to my classroom library, and I do have students who are a fan of romance. I typically have so many complaints when looking for romance books to add to my classroom bookshelf. YA has a whole mess of too spicy and too many profanities and too unhealthy of a relationship romances. However, I was refreshingly surprised by this book.
It follows Lori, a girl who, on the surface, is a control freak but, under the surface, is someone dealing with a lot of loss and is desperate for a semblance of control. She is unknowingly self-sabotaging as she tries to graduate college in three years and get a difficult certification while looking for her dream job, all while taking on every shift Lori can at a job she hates to afford the items mentioned earlier. Chip is conversely carefree, or so he seems. He is struggling with figuring out who he is and what he wants to do with his life and is using the harrowing experience of hiking the entire Appalachian Trail as his crucible to find himself. Together, they end up helping the other person grow, and this book ends up being the first one I have read in a long time that thinks it is a healthy romance, and it actually is.
The plot points were well-paced and planned. Each event made sense with what was happening in every area of the story, and the characters were easily relatable. I found Lori the most relatable when she was agonizing over taking time off of work. I have such trouble in that area, too!
I actually had fun reading this book, even though romance is not my genre of close to choice. I like romance like Lori for the book likes hiking. (Read the book, and you'll get the joke). So, I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed myself as I am nowhere near Mandi Lynn Bell's target audience. More importantly, I have a book I can add to my classroom bookshelf. I think I counted only one use of profanity. There were kisses, but things didn't get spicy, and the relationship between Lori and Chip is a model I can feel good about handing to my students.
I recommend checking this book out if you are a romance genre fan, and if you're not, it still has a lot of good you can get out of it.
Also, I bought this book as a a book adventure box found on Mandi's other website https://stoneridgestickers.com/collections/signed-books which is more dedicated to her stickers. I recommend this experience, especially if you are getting the book as a gift for someone. This isn't an ARC or sponsored ask. It is just how I went about reading the book. I was hoping the little gifts would help me to be motivated to keep reading, just in case I wasn't having fun with the genre as I had expected. The gifts were a nice touch that I, fortunately, didn't need to help me get through the book. I wasn't always completely sure how the gifts related to the page they were on, but they are good quality and fun regardless. If you have been considering doing a book subscription experience like Once Upon a Book Club, this is a more economic way to try out the format while supporting a great author directly.
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