When the Somerset family heads out on a road trip from Wisconsin to Florida, mom Leigh expects plenty of bumps along the way – but even she doesn’t expect to be haunted by ghosts after a strange incident at an abandoned house.
My family has always been big on road trips, and consequently I have spent days driving down endless roads in both the United States and India. You see plenty of road trips on television and in books, but rarely the family caravan type. Here it is reproduced with all its humor, stickiness, and hair-pulling between siblings.
This is a light-hearted, somewhat episodic story which mixes all the usual family road trip vacation cliches with all the cliche horror movie cliches and makes its hay with the stark contrast between the two. There’s plenty of moments with humor that work all the better because of how realistic they feel, and I enjoyed reading the tight-knit bond between the whole family. The sequences with the “Tooth Fairy” and the maternity leggings made me crack up.
However, I did think the story wandered somewhat, maybe because the ghosts weren’t very clear with their hauntings about what on earth they wanted from the Somersets. As such it takes a long time for the plot, slight as it is, to come together. While I enjoyed the paranormal happenings in the story, I wished the ghost storyline had had more of an impact and a payoff at the end of the story than what we got.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.