Pink Polka Dot Books: How to Be Bad by E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle

Roadtrip Book!! This is the story of 3 girls who go on a road trip from Niceville, Florida to Miami.

Jesse- Super-religious, outspoken, judgemental type who lives in a trailer with her non-religious mother. She wants this recent distance between her and Vicks to be gone so they can be the fun friends they used to be.
Vicks- Fun, wild-child with 4 older brothers. Had a great love with her boyfriend Brady until he started college 2 weeks ago and there's been radio silence.
Mel- New girl at The Waffle House where these 3 work. Just moved from Canada to Florida and comes from a wealthy family. She's self conscious, shy, and desperately wants a friendship like Jesse and Vicks have with each other.

Jesse proposed a road trip to Miami so that Vicks can see her boyfriend, and Jesse can work on getting her and Vicks back to how they used to be. It turns out that Vicks hasn't told Jesse about the noncomm with Brady, but she's told Mel, a girl they hardly know. This hurts Jesse, but she pushes forward with the road trip anyway because she's not telling Vicks about her mom's recent cancer diagnosis. So Mel invites herself along promising to finance the trip and off they go.

As they go along to Miami, Vicks brings them to see funny landmarks like "Old Joe" a giant stuffed gator and the world's smallest police station (which turns out to be a phone booth). They laugh and fight and bond and tear apart along the way, and even run into a hurricane. When they finally make it to Miami, they've really figured out much more about each other than they ever thought they would.

I just want to say I love these 3 authors independently, so when I saw they wrote a book together I was excited! It didn't quite live up to the awesomeness that their other books are, but it was still enjoyable. I really hated Jesse through most of the book, but then again I am not religious and Jesse kind of embodies every reason that I don't like to be around religious people. Too judgemental!! But even though I didn't agree with the things she said and felt, I still found myself wanting her to mend things with Vicks and be nicer to Mel.

Mel was almost too much of a sweetheart. How can someone who has everything be so oblivious to it? I really hated how Vicks and Jesse used her for her money for the first half of the book, but I think by the end the bond they formed with her overcame that stuff.

The stuff with Vicks and Brady was really the best part of the book for me. I feel like the things Vicks was thinking was just so true to life. So many girls feel like they are afraid to be "that girl" and allow guys to treat them bad, or just have misunderstandings because of it. Vicks definitely learned that having 4 older brothers doesn't make you an expert on how to be a girlfriend.

If you've loved these author's other books like: The Boyfriend List, Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have), TTYL or Shine there is no guarantee you will like this book. I personally didn't feel the magic that their solo books have in them, and had zero idea who was authoring which character (I assume each author took a character since this was a multiple POV book).

Overall: It's a cute road trip book. It had it's moments, but it's not something that I'm going to remember for a long time and I enjoyed these authors solo efforts better (except Bliss, that was not for me).

Add it to your To-Read List!