(eARC) Roadshow by Nikki Ervice

Thank you to Astra Publishing House x NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. :).
Pub Date: November 10 2026

Synopsis: Annie is burning out. She performs at Club X as Dog-Faced Girl, a burlesque act in which she hides her face behind a dog mask. It’s the only way she can dance—her greatest love—while making enough money for rent. But when she receives an unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Vera, postmarked from the remote island in rural Alaska where Annie grew up, her world stops.

Annie’s mother abandoned her when she was only a few days old. Her father, a stoic, workaholic aluminum welder and fisherman, insisted on keeping her mother’s identity a secret. But now, on her deathbed, Vera wants to meet Annie. And with her father recently passed, Annie knows it’s time to return home. So she borrows a Buick LeSabre and sets out on an exhausting journey through the Midwest into Canada. On the road, Annie sleeps where she can. Her attempts at stripping are unsuccessful and humiliating. Her money dwindles. She begins to steal gas. For a thousand dollars she agrees to dance for a bachelor party at a private lodge on a remote lake. After a delirious, dangerous night that she barely survives, she finally crosses the border into Alaska. Not long after, the LeSabre gives out. Half-broken but drawn on inexorably by the threat of Vera’s death, and a visceral call of her homeland, Annie abandons the LeSabre and hitchhikes to the end of the highway system, across the bay, to the island of her birth, where Vera awaits.

Sexy and fast-paced yet deeply felt, Roadshow explores the power of passion, inheritance, legacy, and class, and the grueling, smiling work of the stage and the hospitality industry.

Review: Grieving her father. Working as a dancer. Receives a letter that says the mother who abandoned her as an infant is now dying in Alaska, proceeds to get into a borrowed car and start driving.

What follows is one woman's exhaustion, longing, and reluctant hope.

The ache of the mother-daughter distance is handled with tenderness. The pacing flip flops a little in the middle, and the ending arrives faster than the build-up promised, but the atmospheric relationship between the duo is there, both in conscious and not. T

For those who are interested in introspective, character-driven fiction over plot-driven twists.