Book Review: In the Driver’s Seat: A Girl’s Guide to Her First Car by Erika Stalder

I wish I had had this book the day I decided to buy a car.

Thankfully I was lucky – the salesperson who took care of me was wonderful and helped me navigate through the entire process at my advantage, even telling me I had bargaining power and helping me decrease the price of the car. But things could have easily gone wrong, and I am (unfortunately) the exception and not the rule.

My luck also held in the couple of years since my big purchase; I have had (touching wood) no breakdowns or mysterious smoke coming out of anywhere. It’s a good thing, since I had nothing in lieu of an easy reference book to figure out what was going on. It’s probably a good thing that I now own this book, since I probably just jinxed myself with the above paragraphs.

Even if you aren’t a teenage girl – the main audience targeted – this book will come in handy if you don’t know much (if anything) about owning a car. The same applies if you already own a car and don’t know anything about how to maintain it – and it’s not because you haven’t had trouble yet that you aren’t going to have some in the future, trust me.

In the Driver’s Seat is also a great book for those of us who do know some things about owning a car but would like to consolidate our learnings into a cohesive whole that would come in handy when the tire punctures on a cold, rainy night. Because, as you would have it, tires never puncture on a warm sunny day. It’s a law of physics or something; punctures always happen during the worse kind of weather.

I’d recommend In the Driver’s Seat as a gift to any teenage girl thinking of purchasing her first of wheels. It would even be a great Christmas stocking stuffer (yup, it’s almost that time of the year again). Written in simple, layman terms yet not condescending, In the Driver’s Seat emphasizes the responsibility that comes with owning a car without making it seem impossible to master, which is exactly the kind of attitude a new car owner should have.

Article Author: Sahar

The author of The Spirit Within Club, Sahar was born the first of three siblings and the first of eight cousins. Thrust in the role of head of the brood at a very early age, she honed her imagination by creating stories and plotlines the eight of them could play to all summer long. …

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