It’s time for Friday Linkups. This week I started Looking for Group by Rory Harrison, which came in the fourth YA box from Quarterly. I can’t even tell you how excited I am for this book (which seems to be a thing; I’ve only read, recently, books I’m super excited about).

So we begin with a Six Word Summary.

Looking for Group in six words: Cancer kid road trips with guild-mate.

Arguably, that’s seven words, but I think I’m going to let it slide.

So now that we know what Looking for Group is about, let’s take a look at the beginning with Book Beginnings hosted by Rose City Reader. Whet our appetite, as it were.

I don’t believe in bucket lists. You can’t experience a whole life in fast forward. If somebody told you to eat the best chocolate cake ever in twelve seconds, you wouldn’t even taste it.

That’s why I never applied to the Wish Foundation people.

He goes on to talk about how little kids don’t know how big the world is, but because he was older when he got sick, he does. To him, it made the things people typically wish for seem smaller. Less like true experiences.

I have yet to reach page 56 (would you believe it? I didn’t schedule my Friday 56 this week), but let’s take a look ahead with The Friday 56 hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice. We know that this is a road trip novel, so I would expect Dylan to either be getting ready to head out, or at the beginning of his road trip on page 56.

But we do it because we like it. Because we want to see the big monsters. And here’s the thing–it’s just me and Arden; we gotta figure out how to do all this stuff, just the two of us. Even though there’s a Looking for Group tool, we don’t use it. That way lies madness: aggros who call everything and everybody a fag, griefers who drop connection just to get everybody killed, and fucking n00bs (shitty players) who need to stop QQ and l2p (quit crying and learn to play).

Clearly the characters aren’t where I thought they’d be by page 56. Here, they’re playing World of Warcraft. The surrounding text shows the relationship between Dylan and Arden and how it’s developed within the WoW context. And it’s lovely. Seriously. Harrison did the work. And all this typing makes me want to go back to it, so I’m going to leave this here now, dear readers.

I leave you with this question:

From what I’ve read so far, both Dylan and Arden are looking for their groups. They’re trying to belong. To do this, they’re going on a road trip. What’s your group, either online or irl? How did you go about finding it?