The Truth about Forever

by Sarah Dessen

Sixteen-year-old Macy Queen is perfect. She’s a great student, a model daughter, and the girlfriend of the smartest boy in school.

There’s just one problem: Macy feels so far from perfect. She’s struggling with grief over her father’s recent death. Additionally, her mother fails to recognize her struggle. She feels like she is forced to wear a mask of perfection for everyone.

Everything changes when Macy’s boyfriend goes away to summer camp for brainiacs. Without Jason, Macy experiences freedom and finds fun at a job with a catering crew. She makes new friends, both male and female, and she discovers that her façade of perfection is no longer necessary to uphold. She can finally just be herself.

I wanted to like this novel, but it has way too many flaws for me to overlook:

• The main character is whiny. Her melodramatic gripes are petty, at best.
• She wallows in her grief, not sharing with anyone, not even her own sister, for a year and a half. How is that possible?
• The whole “brainy” issue seems foreign to Ms. Dessen. Perhaps she should stick to what she knows.

Anyway, I’d hoped for a thoughtful look at a teenager’s grief, with a little romance mixed in, but this novel fell flat. There is too much whining, and there are too many silly subplots. Skip it.

12/19/13

Another title from The United States of YA: http://www.epicreads.com/blog/the-united-states-of-ya/