Let's Get Lost by Adi Alsaid

Let's Get Lost 
By Adi Alsaid
Published: July 29, 2014
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Pages: 352
Format: Ebook
4 stars

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Five strangers. Countless adventures. One epic way to get lost. 

Four teens across the country have only one thing in common: a girl named LEILA. She crashes into their lives in her absurdly red car at the moment they need someone the most. 

There's HUDSON, a small-town mechanic who is willing to throw away his dreams for true love. And BREE, a runaway who seizes every Tuesday—and a few stolen goods along the way. ELLIOT believes in happy endings…until his own life goes off-script. And SONIA worries that when she lost her boyfriend, she also lost the ability to love. 

Hudson, Bree, Elliot and Sonia find a friend in Leila. And when Leila leaves them, their lives are forever changed. But it is during Leila's own 4,268-mile journey that she discovers the most important truth— sometimes, what you need most is right where you started. And maybe the only way to find what you're looking for is to get lost along the way.


*Novel provided by Harlequin Teen and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*


Opening Thoughts

I went into this book with very high expectations.  It appears to have everything that I could want in a contemporary.  It's a road trip book, and who doesn't love road trip books?  There appears to be minimal romance, which is refreshing, since I haven't read a contemporary like that in a while, and it's been getting a lot of buzz in the past few months, especially since they were giving out ARC's of this book at BEA, or Book Expo America, for anyone that didn't know.  So when I got approved for this book a week or so ago, I was super pumped.  This book more like a series of five short stories that are all interconnected.

Characters and Plot

I can't really think of a good way to separate my reviews of the characters and the plot, so I'm just going to change it up a little bit and combine them!

The common denominator in this book, the one that connects these five individual stories together, is Leila.  Leila is driving her car from Louisiana, all the way up into Canada, to see the Northern Lights.  On her journey there, she encounters four different people, Hudson, Bree, Elliot, and Sonia, and with each person, they go on sort of adventure together, for lack of a better word.  However, Leila reveals very little information about herself to these people that she encounters, perhaps to maintain a mysterious aura, but perhaps for a deeper reason.  As this book is told in the third person, you don't know anything about Leila's back story until the very end, when we focus on her.  Leila is a great character, I felt, if slightly underdeveloped.  She's kind to perfect strangers, and she's always willing to do something adventurous, no matter how weird or stupid it is.


"People hurt each other," Leila said without much inflection in her voice.  "It happens to everyone.  Intentionally, unintentionally, regretfully, or not.  It's part of what we do as people.  The beauty is that we have the ability to heal and forgive."


Hudson is a teenage mechanic, and the first person that Leila encounters on her trip.  Leila brings her car into Hudson's dad's shop where Hudson works, and after he works on her car, Hudson offers to show Leila around his small Mississippi town, despite the fact that he has a super important college interview the next morning.

Bree is a teenage runaway, after both her parents died in a car accident, and she's forced to live with her older sister, who Bree feels doesn't care that she lost her parents, and instead, is glad that they died.  Leila picks up Bree while she's hitchhiking, and they do a bunch of crazy, illegal things that had the adult in me shaking her head, but the teenager in me cheering them on.

Elliot has just told his best friend that he's in love with her at their senior prom, only for her to turn him down and run away from him.  A heart-broken Elliot buys a bottle of bourbon, gets tipsy, and walks out in front of Leila's car.  She almost hits him, and in turn for that, she decides to help him get his 80's movie ending.  

Sonia lost the love of her life, Sam, almost a year ago, and she's super close with his family.  The only problem is, she's fallen in love with another guy (after Sam's death of course), and she feels that feeling anything towards Jeremiah is degrading her relationship with Sam.  When Leila has a big fight with Jeremiah the day before his brother is marrying Sam's sister, Sonia meets Leila in a Tim Horton's, and they leave town, going from Canada into Washington, not realizing that the wedding rings are in the pocket of the pocket of Jeremiah's jacket, which Sonia just happens to be wearing.  When they realize it, they immediately leave to go back into Canada, only to have the border guards deny them entrance because they think it's suspicious to go back and forth across the border in such a short time span.  Leila and Sonia embark on a hilarious journey in attempts to get back into Canada in time for the wedding, definitely the adventure that made me laugh the most, and was probably my favorite. 

Overall, Let's Get Lost is the perfect summer read.  It's light and funny, with deep and important messages woven in subtly, and beautifully.  It's the kind of book that is suitable for adults and teenagers alike.  The book read a bit older than a typical young adult book, but that was not at all detrimental to the story.  If anything, it was positive.  This book is all about how people can come into our lives for a short time and completely change them, which is a universal topic, relatable for anyone, regardless of your age.  I'd recommend this to fans of John Green, particularly Paper Towns, though really any of his books.

Let me know if you're excited for this book to release, or if you also managed to get ahold of an ARC, if you enjoyed it.  Did you like me combining the characters and plot?  Thanks for reading!

Amber