What Now, Mom?

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

Ricky and Jamie and Mom and Dad go on a long weekend vacation, driving
from Moncton to Montreal. Wouldn’t you know it, everything goes wrong!
First the alternator goes, then they have a flat tire. There’s a
convention in Montreal so they can’t find a hotel room, and on the way
home the fan belt self-destructs. Everyone spends virtually the whole
weekend in the car, and they get to do very little of what they had
planned. They are together, though, and that’s what matters.

A series of visits to fast food restaurants does not a plot make. Nor
does this book have any memorable characters. What dialogue it has jumps
madly from fake “childspeak” to very precocious utterings on the
part of the children, with parental speeches managing to be both
clichéd and inane. Even in the moments of high drama (e.g., the spots
of car trouble), it is difficult to feel much sympathy for people who
are prepared to put their own safety at risk by driving a car that is so
incredibly unroadworthy. In addition, the book is riddled with
grammatical errors, and the author has but a tenuous grip on the rules
of punctuation. Children deserve a higher standard of literature and
better models of writing than this book provides. Not recommended.