Review: Let's Get Lost by Adi Alsaid

Thank you to Netgalley for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

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.

I am a sucker for road trip stories so I was really excited about ‘Let’s Get Lost’ – it’s just a shame that it didn’t live up to the hype. The entire novel is centered around Leila, who breezes through four strangers lives at just the right time to magically fix all their troubles and woes. This could have been brilliant, but unfortunately Leila was nothing more than an attractive plot device. She had no substance, no depth, and whilst we do find out a little more about her in the final section and some of this lack of character is explained, it is not enough to redeem her.

The other characters are, on the whole, a continuing mess of clichés. There is Hudson whose main feature is how completely and instantly he falls in love with Leila. Again there is no depth, he is a cut out caricature and I felt that the entirety of his section, but particularly the ending, were trite and ridiculous. I love a good love story, just look at the number of romances I read! But I like to have some reality mixed in, and characters that actually have something that connects them, not a bunch of clichés and stereotypes.
Bree followed in a similar vein, with yet more stereotyping. Actually I found Bree’s section the hardest to read, I felt like I was watching a slow motion car crash and just desperately wanted to look away.

I was slightly more taken by Sonia and Elliot’s stories, because they actually felt a little more real, a little more human and a lot more interesting. However whilst Sonia held my attention right the way through, Elliot’s section and the message it was giving was ruined by the ending. That said, by the time I reached Sonia’s story, the formula of ‘Everything is terrible, Leila breezes in and fixes everything’ was getting decidedly old by this point.

I wanted to love this book, I kept reading and hoping desperately that it would get better, but unfortunately it never really took off for me. The characters were weak and experienced no real development, just a straight pattern formula that became decidedly tired by the end of the book.

It’s a shame because there are some moments that are brilliant, where the writing really shines and the humour is laugh out loud. However it is too sporadic to really stand a chance of redeeming the book.