See You Down the Road
by Kim Ablon Whitney
SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD by Kim Ablon Whitney
Category: Contemporary
Age Recommendation: Grades 9+
Release Date: 7/12/05
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Reviewed by: Jocelyn Pearce
Rating: 5 Stars
Bridget and her family are Travelers. They’re a little-known group of people in America who travel around the country,
making money in usually illegal ways, and keep to themselves, with their own traditions and way of life. People who aren’t
Travelers are called Country, and Travelers usually isolate themselves from these people. They don’t trust them, and only
interact with them to scam money off of them. Travelers only go to Country schools for a few years, just long enough to
know what they need to.
Bridget is a little different from many Travelers in that way. She works Country jobs, as a cashier, and she’s been going to
Country schools years longer than most other Traveler teenagers. Still, though, she keeps to the Traveler way most of the
time. She and her friend, Ann, make their money by ripping off the local K-mart in whatever town they’re in. Her parents
have arranged a marriage for her, with Ann’s brother, Patrick. Her brother, Jimmy, has grown up helping their father fix
driveways and roofs with watered-down sealant to make a better profit by scamming Country people.
Bridget doesn’t always like her life as a Traveler. She isn’t sure she wants to marry Patrick, even though he’s a nice guy and
she does like him, but she’s never see any way out of it. Then her uncle, Big Jim, takes Bridget, Jimmy, and Patrick with him
all the way to Arizona, where they’ll pull off the biggest scam that Bridget’s ever been involved in. They’ll sell condos that
don’t meet the building codes, and then run off with the money. The beauty of it is, the contractor won’t dare tell on them, as
he’s the one who hired them to sell condos that don’t meet building codes.
In Arizona, Bridget has some time to think about a lot of things, and maybe even figure out what she wants. But then she
makes a discovery about her family, one that could change everything for Bridget…The choice is hers, but what will she
decide?
Before reading SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD, I had never heard of Travelers. I don’t think many people have, but
they’re real people, and reading about them was very interesting. Their way of life is very different from the way most of us
live, and this is an eye-opening book. Many of us don’t realize how differently some people live from us, not just in far away
places but right here in the United States.
On top of that, SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD is full of amazing characters, and is very well written. All of the characters
are well-drawn, realistic, and three-dimensional; even the very minor characters seem alive. The ending is not what we might
expect from this sort of book, but it fits well, and is one that I really liked. It wasn’t predictable, and it was still a happy
ending. Whitney’s ending, I felt, stayed true to the characters and flowed with the rest of the story wonderfully.
