This book is a great summer read about how we can forget and forgive the past when stuck in a car with people from our last for a long time.

This is a very sweet and charming story. I couldn't put it down!
Beth O'Leary does a great job of humanising these characters in a way you can't help but root for them.
Would recommend!

The Road Trip was my first Beth O’Leary book, it was a great first choice.
Addie and her sister Deb are travelling to a wedding in the North of Scotland when they have a collision with another car! Can you imagine how Addie felt when she realised the driver was her Ex boyfriend Dylan and his best friend Marcus.
They end up travelling to the wedding together in Debs mini. Definitely a recipe for disaster.
With an extra passenger Rodney in the mix too there is just one drama after another!
Will they ever reach the final destination? Read it and see, you’ll not regret it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus for the advanced copy of Beth’s very witty book.

The plot is absurd and just gets more absurd as the story progresses with each layer unfolding another ridiculous scenario. There is an ex boyfriend, an awful boyfriends friend, a dramatic bride to be, a trucker to the rescue, a stalker and more. Despite this is a great book, well written, funny, sad and ridiculous in parts. Despite the romance/comedy set up some deeper themes are touched on which stops the book being a 100% trashy romance novel. Overall would recommend to anyone looking for an easy to read, not to deep but not to shallow peace of fiction. Perfect for a sunny day in the garden or at the beach.

The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary is a sweet story of second chances and a wonderful blend of funny and poignant. It's perfect holiday reading, or ideal to pick up when you just need something warm and comforting to escape from the real world.
The premise is fairly simple, Addie and her sister are heading to Scotland for a friend's wedding, and its going to be the perfect road trip, the snacks are sorted, the playlist is set and the road lies ahead. However they have barely left home when a car rear ends them , and to add insult to injury , it is driven by none other than Dylan, Addie's ex. He and his best friend are heading to the wedding too, and when it transpires that their car is no longer safe to drive, the obvious solution is that they all travel together, even if this is something that neither Addie nor Dylan are thrilled about. A four hundred mile road trip in close proximity with an ex does not make for a comfortable trip , and as one thing after another goes wrong the tension between the pair mounts and they are forced to rehash the reasons why they broke up in the first place.
The book moves between the current day road trip and the past where we see the development of Addie and Dylan's relationship as well as why it fell apart. and the two timelines are nicely woven together throughout the book. I liked that we got to see both sides of the story and that the author made sure that neither character was perfect, both had flaws that contributed to the ending of the relationship. On the downside I couldn't find a single redeeming feature for Dylan's friend Marcus, he was thoroughly unlikeable from the beginning of the book to the end and I really struggled to see how Dylan put up with him for so long. The book opens with a literal bang, but then the pace slows quite a bit, much like the traffic our characters encounter, before speeding to a conclusion that borders on farcical at times.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher , all opinions are my own.

I don't know what it is about O'Leary's writing but somehow it never seems to draw me in as much as it does everyone else. I enjoyed her previous work, The Flatshare was good but I also wasn't emotionally invested, if that makes sense?
Here it was the same - I loved all the elements (who isn't a sucker for a good road trip story) and while I enjoyed my reading experience, I could not for the life of my tell you the names of the protagonist and the love interest, which is not...good.
But the book was!
So definitely a me problem and my sieve brain and less that of the book. Hoping to one day find a O'Leary book I can totally connect to because she is so beloved!

I love Beth’s books but this one was a bit of a change of story / pace / theme. It took me by surprise but I did enjoy it in the end. There were perhaps a few too silly, frivolous events on the roadtrip and I found I much preferred the chapters in the past. But it all came together well in the end.
I’d really like to reread this one now knowing the nature of the story.

As always Beth books are really good, enjoyed every min of it.

Every book I read if Beth it absolutely brilliant

The Road Trip is set in a Mini Cooper, odd? Yes, but it works. Deb and Addie are travelling to Scotland for a wedding when their car is rear ended by no other than Addie’s ex, Dylan and his best friend, Marcus who are also on the way to the same wedding, and who now need a lift. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a bit it would seem.
So they, Addie, Deb, Dylan, Marcus and Rodney who was already being given a lift, all resume their Scotland trip in, you’ve guessed it, a Mini Cooper. With too much traffic on the road and too many secrets in the car the running is not smooth.

The Road Trip is packed with slap stick humour that reminds me of old Charlie Chaplin movies, it’s a joyful bit of escapism that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

Beth O’Leary is quickly becoming the Queen of romcom. She is single handedly upping the bar of this genre, her books are light, funny and full of warmth. What I particularly love about her characters is their depth, they may be flawed, they may not even be likeable (cough cough Marcus) but they are always complex and have a discernible journey.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

After reading the Switch I had high hopes for the Roadtrip. However, I struggled to connect to the characters and found the constant interruptions of their journey neither funny nor unpredictable. The Charme that the the characters of the Switch had, was missing from this book.

The only thing that kept me reading was the curiosity about how and why Addie and Dylan‘s relationship had ended. But even that revelation did not improve my overall opinion.

I did appreciate the overall character development of Addie, Dylan, Marcus and Dylan’s mom.

Simply beautiful! This is my third Beth O’Leary book and I’ve adored them all. This one is warm, captivating, full of emotion and will give you all the feels.

Absolutely brilliant. Beth O’Leary has produced another corker. However reader beware - if you’re expecting a story on a similar vein as her previous stories, this won’t compare. This is a very different beast - it’s darker and feels more grown up. Both in O’Leary’s plotting, character development and storytelling.

This is funny, full of romance, charm and family/human drama. I love the relationships between Addie, Dylan and her sister Deb and his best friend Marcus. The character development of these main characters and those in support really pulls you in. I’ve read some unfavourable reviews for Marcus, but for me he’s the character with the most development, so stick with him.

This book is about forgiveness and the lengths we’ll go to for the ones we truly love. How we’ve always got their back, no matter their destructive behaviour and the consequences. And it’s also about journeys (yes the literal ones) but also the journeys we go in our selves as we grow and change, particularly as some characters go to some dark places. Loved it!!! When’s book 4 out?

⚠️ TW and potential spoiler: there’s reference to an attempted sexual assault (not in any detail)⚠️

Another fantastic book by Beth O’Leary, I’ve read and loved them all.
Sisters Addie and Deb are on their way to a friend’s wedding in Scotland. Rodney is unknown to them and tagging along, he’s was on the wedding Facebook Group and needed a ride the wedding. Unfortunately a traffic accident which involves Addies ex boyfriend Dylan and his best friend Marcus, who are incidentally on the way to the same wedding, sees them all travelling to Scotland together in Deb’s Mini. Really, what more could go wrong.......
I found this book quite refreshing. A mixture of moments which put a big smile on my face to quite serious topics but it wasn’t until I finished that those came to mind. We as readers, know at the beginning that Addie and Dylan broke up with unfinished business but it’s not revealed why or how till very late in the book. Chapters are set as ‘Now’ and ‘Then’, which I found a little hard to get into the groove at first but we get an insight to their relationship and it’s workings and complications.
The characters all had their own issues and foibles and I enjoyed seeing the growth and changes. I can say that money does not ensure happiness.
A great read.
Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for a copy to read.

I have read both Beth’s previous novels and enjoyed them, I think she is 1 of my favourite authors. I find her writing style so relatable that all her characters jump out of the page and you feel part of their journey and do not want to leave them at the end of the story. This was another great story and I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in Dylan and Addie’s story, along with the other characters that are part of their lives. There were some laugh out loud parts as well as some more emotional sections, but as usual the author’s writing is so gifted that it is a joy to read.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read a preview copy of this book.

At the moment, we would all love to go out on the open road and go on an adventure and the best way at the moment is via Beth O'Leary's third novel, The Road Trip!

This is a road trip like no other! One that Addie and Deb were certainly not expecting to plan out the way it did! All set in their Mini Cooper, with their favourite music and snacks, the sisters are on their way to rural Scotland to attend a friend’s wedding. Due to an incident, they then end up taking Addie's ex-boyfriend Dylan, his friend Marcus and Rodney, a Facebook 'hitchhiker!' A completely different journey to the one original planned! Imagine travelling over 400 miles with your ex-boyfriend in the car along with this friend and a stranger - all in a tiny Mini Cooper!

We see the story through two viewpoints - that of Addie and Dylan - this allows us to see an in-depth character analysis, their personalities and the chemistry between them. Addie and Dylan have not seen each other since they split up two years ago, and the book alternates between when they first met and now.

The Road Trip book draws on true friendships, past relationships, the future and finding your true self. Very hard-hitting topics are tackled, sensitively and skilfully. The Road Trip is a rollercoaster of a book, a very emotional read but extremely funny too.

I absolutely loved The Flatshare and The Switch and I did find The Road Trip a much more complex novel, which I found at times hard to follow. Part of this was due to the dual timeline and the switching between the two characters story. I also did not gel with the characters as much as I did in Beth O'Leary's first two books where I felt I was must more invested in each of the characters.

Not my normal type of read but pleasurable and also funny at times. Following a trip full of disasters and an underlying love story, there was enough of a pull to keep my interest.

Big fan of The Switch and The Flat Share so I was excited for the Road Trip. It was the fun read that I needed and I devoured it in 2 days of reading. I loved the dynamics of the people in the car, a mix of people that you would not want to spend a very long car trip with

It has been almost 2 years since Addie and Dylan broke up, breaking off contact with each other completely. But a cruel twist of fate sees them together again, along with Dylan's best mate Marcus, who never thought Addie was right for Dylan, Addie's sister Deb who is on her first baby free trip since giving birth to her son, and Rodney, a random who needed a lift to a mutual friends wedding in Scotland.

It is a very long way from the south coast of England to Scotland by car, especially on a Bank Holiday weekend. If it can go wrong it does go wrong, and we have a hilarious set of situations that the 5 get themselves into on route to the wedding. Add to that the tension and the awkwardness of the relationships and it is a wild ride.

We learn about how Dylan and Addie met and fell in love, and then broke up through now and then chapters telling the story. It is not all fun and games, there are some serious subjects discussed in this story.

But will they make it to the wedding without killing each other? That is a very good questions - you will have to read it to find out

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my advanced copy of this book to read.

The Road Trip was one of my most anticipated novels of the year, and it didn't disappoint. This was the story of Addie and Dylan, told in two timelines; one when they are taken an ill fortuned road trip together after a long time of not seeing each other because of a bad break up; and one when they are getting together in the first place. There's second chances, a lot of yearning and longing which is so far up my wheelhouse it's practically in my kitchen (or my car!)

Beth O'Leary always writes interesting, dynamic and realistic characters, and I found this group compelling, even if I didn't like all of them. I think my problem was that I found Addie and Dylan's relationship a bit insta lovey (although I was invested so maybe it didn't matter).

This was such an interesting read. Beth O'Leary books tend to have slow starts, but this took me longer than usual to get into. But once I got to the second half I couldn't put it down. It's romantic, yes, but it also says so much about complacency, complicity and turning a blind eye in friendships between men.

Really good book, I'll continue to pick up whatever Beth O'Leary puts down.

Beth O'Leary writes the best books and characters honestly, if someone asked me to categorise her books I'd put them in the genre 'books to make your heart happy'. The Road Trip perhaps isn't as warm and fuzzy as her first two books, but I quite like that there was a more serious edge and some contentious characters to add some drama. I don't think it's stolen The Switch's spot as my ultimate number 1 happy book, but I did really enjoy it.

I quite liked the clever way that you genuinely feel as though you are on a Road Trip with the gang in the 'Now' passages. Things move slowly, there are times where they are just stuck in traffic, or discussing the snack situation, whilst the history and revelations of the past slowly unravel alongside it. I'm probably making that sound boring, but I really enjoyed it because I felt like I was in the car with the characters.

I loved Addie and Deb, the sisters had such a lovely relationship and I just loved Deb's IDGAF attitude to life, the universe and everything. I also really enjoyed that, although Addie and Dylan's relationship had ended and had clearly had some issues, there wasn't anything majorly toxic there, so you could actually enjoy their slow reconciliation. Marcus was clearly a bit of an arse, but he did make me laugh at times, and he gets a little redemption as you learn what makes him tick.

The last 10% of the book was just adorable, and it left me with a stupid smile on my face to rival even the magical fairy truck drivers. A journey where everything that could go wrong, did. I'm kind of glad I wasn't actually in the car with the band of misfits, but it was a wonderful read! Will be recommending it, along with all of Beth's books.

I loved this one! It was light-hearted and funny - It genuinely made me laugh out loud at times. It was written perfectly, right down to the little details.
I loved the characters and the development in them all, even the side characters had their own stories but nothing got confusing and it all made sense.
I loved how the characters had flaws and those flaws and harder topics were dealt with and handled really well, they werent glossed over or shied away from.
I think Beth O'Leary is going to be an autobuy author for me from now on.