Skip to main content

High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Road Trip


By Melissa de la Cruz
Los Angeles: Disney-Hyperion, 2021. Fiction. 263 pgs.

The East High Wildcats are still fresh from the success of their production of High School Musical: The Musical when Carlos finds out about an HSM convention in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and proposes a last minute, road-trip field trip. Of course, all of the Wildcats and their fearless leader Miss Jenn jump at the chance to attend panels about dancing, singing, acting, and much more. Plus, rumor has it that stars from the original High School Musical cast will be in attendance. Everyone has their own reason to attend, but one thing is clear -- even if the road gets bumpy, nothing will stop our Wildcats.

Fans of High School Musical, and especially High School Musical: The Musical: The Series on Disney+, will fall in love with this goofy road trip story. The novel picks up right at the end of season one of the TV show and offers an additional story for readers who can't get enough of HSM. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different Wildcat, which helps move the story along in a light and conversational way. Most readers will probably want to be familiar with the tv show before diving into this story, but there is plenty of explanation to make the text accessible to readers who have never seen the show. As a grown-up High School Musical fan, I can promise that this book is a lot of fun.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Alice with a Why

Alice with a Why By Anna James New York: Penguin, 2026. Fiction. 240 pgs. In 1919, in the aftermath of the first World War, Alyce is living with her grandmother in the English countryside. Her grandmother, also named Alice, tells Alyce (with a y) stories from her childhood adventures in a wonderful land filled with white rabbits and mad hatters. Alyce doesn't really believe the silly stories, she just misses her father who was killed in the war. One day, Alyce receives a mysterious invitation to tea, and subsequently falls into a pond where she is transported to Wonderland. Her grandmother, of course, is that Alice. Alyce is prompted by the Mad Hatter, Dormouse, and March Hare to seek out the Time Being and put an end to the war between the Sun King and the Queen of the Moon. Thus begins Alyce's adventure through Wonderland. I have a certain soft spot for the original story of Alice in Wonderland. It is one of my particular favorites and I often have a hard time reading new int...

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...