“I need a ride.” What do you do when the person you grew up with, your very best friend is making bad choices that could get them and you in trouble? How far will your loyalties go?

Diego and Lawson are high school seniors. They have been “brothers” since elementary school. They have at least ten years of great memories which all are at jeopardy because of choices that they both “have to” make. They are at pivotal points in their lives during a time where most kids are deciding about life after high school.

This fiction in verse will make readers question their own loyalty to friends. How far is too much? Would you ever sacrifice your own long term well- being to help save a friend who may be facing a long term problem? Lawson protects Diego anytime someone tries to pick at him. He wouldn’t let anyone talk bad about him. He would give Diego the shirt off his back but that’s what you do in friendship, and right? Diego would do the same. Both boys are on two different paths and one is taken because of circumstances and survival that seem out of their hands. This book will make you question what conditions leads to choices like this. What could have been done before it got to that point. Readers will be rooting for both characters because while on the outside one of the boys seems “bad” his true story tells something different.

I enjoyed reading this story.

I loved this book from start to finish.

When We Ride explored themes of friendship, growth, poverty, drugs, resiliency, and found family. Diego is doing everything he can to make something of himself. His mum is a mostly recovering alcoholic is laying on incredible first-generation guilt and hope on her only child and trying so hard to get him out, and Diego is watching his best friend Lawson sell drugs to put food on the table for his own family. Diego seems to be doing everything he can to keep his found family together while also looking for a way to be more. This book truly wrote about the levels to which addiction and drugs use ripple through a family. Every "I need a ride" will give you feelings.

Thanks to NetGalley for the arc!