Before
she arrived at the Spring Meadows rehab center Madeline’s high school
classmates referred to her as “Mad Dog” Maddie. She not only had a severe
drinking problem but she became angry and violent when she drank. Now she is
trying to straighten herself out. Spring Meadows is not glamorous and is hard
for Maddie, whose family is well off, to adjust to. Things get better when she
meets Stewart on her halfway house’s weekly movie night. He’s slightly older
and from another halfway house just down the road. She immediately has a crush
on him. Things start to get serious between them once they are out of rehab.
Maddie
returns to high school and hides out in the library during lunch. She’s afraid
of associating with her old, hard partying friends. At the library she meets
Martin, a socially awkward, honors student and develops a friendship with him
after a somewhat rocky beginning. She also starts hanging out with Trish, a
train wreck of a girl from her halfway house. Since they’ve both been to
rehabe, Maddie finds that she can relate better to Trish than to most of the
people at her high school.
Maddie’s
encounters with some of her fellow recovering substance abusers are gut-wrenching.
I wanted her to make sensible decisions and not get pulled back into the life
of an addict. Even though I rooted for her to stay on the straight and narrow, Recovery Road made it easy to see why
sobriety is not as simple as deciding to say no. Particularly challenging for
Maddie is making a completely new set of friends late in high school and trying
to cope with being very lonely. Blake Nelson’s Recovery Road neither glamorizes nor goes into some kind of
fear-seeking hysteria regarding substance abuse. Despite how realistic the book
is, or perhaps because of it, Recovery
Road still manages not to be boring at all.
John
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