Summer Reading, Part Two

I have been waiting a long time for a specific book to hit the shelves.  I'm one of those people, the kind that likes an author so much I stalk their website, looking for the release date of their next novel.  But, in the chaos of post-grad life, I completely missed the release date and didn't pick up The Moon and More until about ten days after it came out.  Even then, I was in the middle of another book, so I had to wait to catch up on the happenings in Colby until just recently.

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I have been a fan of Sarah Dessen ever since her novel This Lullaby.  Although she is fairly famous for her earliest novels That Summer and Someone Like You (which were adapted into the Mandy Moore movie How to Deal), I'm not so much a fan of the books that came before This Lullaby.  As far as I'm concerned,  that's where Dessen hit her stride with YA fiction, with the notable exception of Lock and Key, which was a disappointment in the middle of a great run.

The Moon and More, like many of Dessen's books, contains cameo appearances of characters from previous novels.  Some might consider this cheesy, but I feel it's a brilliant move - we all know that pain of not wanting a novel to end, so why not give us a sneak peak back at the characters we love and how they're doing now?  It's set in the southern beach town of Colby, and centers around Emaline's struggle to deal with biological and step family, the start of college, her perfect boyfriend who just doesn't seem right anymore, the new guy, and the expectations everyone else holds for her.

With The Moon and More, I couldn't predict the end, and for most of the book, I wasn't sure how I wanted it to end.  Although the ending was someone reminiscent of Lock and Key, it was the perfect ending to a well-written story that made discomfort and embarrassment leap of the page.  I know this will be one of those books I hand down when I have a daughter.