Road to Paradise

A journey of 4,000 miles will take these three girls beyond anything they have ever imagined, in search of a mother, a lover, and other, far darker experiences.

It's 1981 and new high school graduate Shelby Sloane gets a car: a canary yellow Mustang convertible. She sets out on an odyssey to find her mother that will see her and her one time best friend Gina cross four thousand miles, the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Salt Flats of Utah, and some of the loneliest highways in the country.

They plan for their trip to be short - money is tight - and they both have to get ready for college. Shelby is going to California to fiind her mother, Gina is going to California to stop her boyfriend from 'accidentally' marrying someone else.

From the beginning the trip does not go as planned, things take longer, cost more and they hit snags on the road.

When the pair see a young woman hitchhiking on the side of a country road in Maryland they don't want to pick her up. They turn their gaze away, and speed down the road. But days later, far north, in the flats of Indiana on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, they find her again. They stop at a red light and there she is, waiting for them. Shelby thinks it's fate. Gina also thinks it's fate, but not the good kind. "Keep going" she warns. "It's a test. Don't stop the car".

The girls' story at its core is the human quest for meaning, for trancendent discovery, for explanation of the unfathomable human heart.

Harper Collins
Author: Paullina Simons
ISBN: 9780007241590
RRP: $32.99