(SPOILERS) Stops Along the Way by Anna Sortino

Book Synopsis:

Iris doesn’t trust the odds. Not when she has a 1 in 4 chance of inheriting the same vision diagnosis as her sister, Amelia.

When Iris travels to the east coast to help Amelia drive her things back from college, the last person she expects to run into on campus is Declan, her board game club rival, but he’s also there to drive his brother home for summer break. The unlikely occurrence results in the four of them caravaning together to Nebraska.

Iris and Declan are used to competing with dice and cards across a table, but the romantic feelings unfolding as they drive across the map are a total surprise. The odds of falling in love on the road seem low, especially amid car troubles and sister drama. Can Iris look past probability and embrace the unexpected? My Review:

Note: I received an ARC of this book through NetGalley.

3.75/5 stars. I was very excited to read this book from the premise alone. It promised blindness representation and delivered. The disability representation was the best part of the book. I loved how it showed the in-between on the spectrum of blindness and deafness. Some of the plot execution, however, fell short. There were a lot of threads introduced that had so much potential but didn't go anywhere or weren't as fleshed out as they could have been.

Right away, there were so many relatable little details with Amelia's blindness, like her getting frustrated she can't follow a visually-complex board game as well anymore, not recognizing people who come up and start talking to her, and using her phone to zoom into a menu. There was also representation of a different disability with the main character, Iris. While I couldn't relate to her experiences as much, I could tell the depiction was a great example of disability in general. I got a good laugh out of the airport staff presenting Iris with a wheelchair because she needed accommodations. That same situation has happened to me.

The biggest strength of the disability representation is that it shows how much of a spectrum there is. Usually in media, characters are portrayed as fully blind/deaf or fully sighted/hearing. But in this book, Amelia can still see a lot but struggles with other things, and Iris uses hearing aids but can still hear a little bit without them. The book even briefly mentioned how even two people with the same vision condition have different experiences.

I enjoyed all the characters and their dynamic. The dialogue between them all was very natural. Declan and Iris had great banter, and the sibling relationships were fun, too. Declan was a very sweet character. I liked Iris and Declan's relationship, but some of the poor communication was awkward and annoying.

Where Stops Along the Way loses points is in its plot and pacing. Mainly, it seemed like the author wanted to do more than she actually accomplished, and the book moved too fast for her to spend time on everything. There were some things introduced that I would have loved to see developed, like Amelia not wanting to tell her friends about her blindness. That could have made for great character growth. While I understand the central plot didn't relate to her and her friends as much, the sisters could have had conversations about it. Or the author should not have set it up in the first place only for it to not come up in the end.

An example of a plot that had some development but not as much as it could have was Iris' fear of inheriting her sister's vision condition. The blurb presents this as a major plot point, but it kind of took a backburner to the romantic drama. The fear exists in the back of her mind the whole book, and then it flashes forward to where she has the diagnosis and deals with it, but we don't see any of that. That would have been so interesting.

Content:

Language: sh*t, God's name taken in vain, d*mn, p*ssed, a mention of flipping people off

Sexual Content: Kissing, making out that isn't shown except for the first kiss

Violence/Gore: None

Drugs/Alcohol: None