This book feels like one long, exhausted breath you’ve been holding for years. Roadshow is messy, lonely, melancholic, and surprisingly intimate. Annie spends most of the book physically moving toward something, crossing thousands of miles to reach Alaska, while emotionally feeling like she’s barely moving at all. I loved how quiet this was and how painfully real Annie felt throughout it.

Annie is burning out in New York, working as a bartender and performing at Club X as Dog-Faced Girl, a burlesque persona that lets her dance while hiding behind a mask. Her father has recently died, and then a letter arrives from Vera, the mother who abandoned Annie when she was only days old.

Vera is dying.

So Annie borrows a Buick LeSabre and starts driving to Alaska to meet the mother she has never actually known.

This is technically a road-trip novel, but it never has that romantic feeling of getting in a car and discovering yourself somewhere along the highway. Annie is broke. She sleeps wherever she can. Her attempts to make money dancing along the way are often humiliating. She steals gas. She meets strangers who range from kind to genuinely frightening.

The entire journey feels exhausting.

And I mean that as a compliment.

I could practically feel the sticky clothes, shitty sleep, dwindling money, endless road, and desperation of trying to reach somewhere when you barely have enough resources to make it another hundred miles. There’s this constant sense of movement without Annie ever really escaping anything.

Annie herself was what made the book work for me. She's lonely, grieving, reckless, passive, and sometimes frustrating. She doesn't feel like a character who has been carefully constructed to have the perfect emotional breakthrough at exactly the right moment. She feels like someone who genuinely doesn't know what she's doing and keeps moving because stopping would mean having to sit with everything she's avoiding.

I also loved the way dancing exists alongside all of this. Dog-Faced Girl gives Annie a way to perform while simultaneously hiding herself, which feels incredibly appropriate for someone who spends so much of the book struggling with who she is outside of the identities she's built to survive.

And then there's Vera.

The closer Annie gets to Alaska, the more the question shifts from whether she'll actually reach her mother to what reaching her is supposed to accomplish. How do you meet the person who abandoned you? What are they supposed to say that could possibly make decades of absence make sense? And what happens if you cross an entire continent only to discover there isn't an answer waiting for you?

I think that's why the quietness worked so well for me. There isn't some enormous plot driving Roadshow. It's grief, awkward encounters, loneliness, family, womanhood, money, exhaustion, and all the weird little moments that happen while Annie keeps moving.

It occasionally moved too quietly for me, which is what kept it from five stars. There were stretches where I wanted a little more momentum. But even when not much was happening externally, I stayed invested in Annie and the strange, melancholy journey she was taking.