Title: The Truth About Forever
Author: Sarah Dessen
Published: May, 2004 by Puffin
Pages: 383
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

Sixteen-year-old Macy Queen is looking forward to a long, boring summer. Her boyfriend is going away. She’s stuck with a dull-as-dishwater job at the library. And she’ll spend all of her free time studying for the SATs or grieving silently with her mother over her father’s recent unexpected death. But everything changes when Macy is corralled into helping out at one of her mother’s open house events, and she meets the chaotic Wish Catering crew.

Before long, Macy joins the Wish team. She loves everything about, the work and the people. But the best thing about Wish is Wes—artistic, insightful, and understanding Wes—who gets Macy to look at life in a whole new way, and really start living it.

Final Thoughts: I’ve been in a reading slump lately, and what better to jog me out of it than reading a great Sarah Dessen contemporary? The Truth About Forever is a charming coming-of-age tale, yet in my opinion, not as great as the two other Dessen books I’ve read in the past.

I think what I struggled with most about The Truth About Forever was the slow pace. While I am used to contemporary books being generally relaxed and laid back, this one seemed to drag on with nothing exceptional happening. Like all other Dessen books, it’s character-driven, but this time the absence of a stimulating plot was quite noticable.

I did enjoy the characters, particularly the Wish crew and our narrator, Macy. Each character is quite fleshed out and likeable, something I’ve come to expect with Sarah Dessen. Each voice has a story to tell and a lesson to teach, and Sarah Dessen does it in quite a poetic way. It’s something I particularly marvel at with her storytelling. That being said, while I loved the characters, I just wished that they’d have done stuff.

The Truth About Forever consists of catering disasters, property selling, working at a library desk, and that’s about it. We shuffle between these scenarios constantly, with our narrator Macy at the helm. The stuff I really loved – the Truth game between Macy and our leading man, Wes – didn’t happen often enough for my tastes. I was constantly waiting on them to ‘fess up about their feelings for one another, but it never really happened until the final pages.

I liked Wes, I really did (there are so many readers I’ve seen gush about him, too!) but there seemed to be too little of him when compared to the romantic relationships in the other Dessen books I’ve read (Just Listen and Along for the Ride). I was looking for a romance-driven contemporary and this book didn’t quite deliver.

However, it is a great story of one girl understanding her place in the world, and what she has to do to be happy in it. If you’re a fan of Sarah Dessen and have yet to read this one, you will probably want to do so. While it isn’t exactly as stimulating or as much of a page-turner as her other books, I think it’s pretty much a ‘classic’ when considering her body of work.

Recommended to: Fans of Sarah Dessen should pick it up. However, if you’re looking for a more ‘romance-driven’ contemporary, give one of her other books a shot first.

About the Author Sarah Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and attended UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating with highest honors in Creative Writing. She is the author of several novels, including Someone Like You, Just Listen and Along for the Ride. A motion picture based on her first two books, entitled ‘How to Deal’, was released in 2003. She lives in North Carolina.

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