After 14 novels, Sarah Dessen’s latest, The Rest of the Story, still manages to hit all the right notes for this long-time reader.
Certain things – be it a song, a shift in the weather, or a certain smell in the air — can make a season feel like it officially has arrived. For many, many years the arrival of a Sarah Dessen novel has been a hallmark of my unofficial start of summer. Sometimes Dessen’s novels arrive under the radar, other times I preorder and wait for the release date. Some summers there are no releases and I pick up a well-worn copy from the early-aughts and revisit the beach towns, high school halls, and tedious summer jobs of years prior.
Why do I keep coming back to Sarah Dessen? Summers were typically spent with one weekly trip to the library. Typically, I would pick an author and read through their entire collection before moving on. Lucky for me, Beverly Cleary had an entire anthology of Ramona Quimby adventures for me to peruse and Sharon Creech had several tales under her belt. Harry Potter was a once-per-year event and so I worked my way through the shelves supplementing the weeks with names like Bloom, Spinnelli, Jacques, and more.
Then the summer of Dessen arrived. The first book I picked up was Someone Like You. By this point, Dessen had several books out — This Lullaby, That Summer, Keeping the Moon, Dreamland. I read them all in one summer and then joined the annual (sometimes biannual) wait for new releases. The first was The Truth About Forever.
Details of novels blend, but categorize themselves by title when I pick up a copy and read over the character’s names, the details of the town. But The Truth About Forever is the one that I can recall in detail. The novels tend to incorporate some element of an emotional hurdle, one that, if not completely surmounted, is at least addressed and challenged in some way by the characters through their interactions with faces both old and new. And of course, there is the summer. A character so ever present in Dessen’s novels, that back in 2017, I asked her about it.
“I’ve always been fascinated with summer. When I was in high school there was so much potential in summer time. People would go away, school would end in June and we’d come back in August and people would have totally changed. There was this whole opportunity for transformation, which I think as an adult doesn’t happen that way anymore. Time is sped up. You have this period where anything can happen and you are off your regular schedule,” Dessen noted.
The transformative stories are what keep me coming back to Dessen’s novels summer after summer. There are, of course, romances that bring out new sides of the leading women in Dessen’s novels. But there are also female friendships, familial connections (and detachments) without which none of the growth in the novel would be possible.
So, here we are in 2019 with another Dessen novel, The Rest of the Story. In the summer before senior year, Emma finds herself misplaced for three weeks as her remarried father heads off on his honeymoon, her paternal grandmother embarks on a cruise, and her best friend is called away to deal with a family emergency. Luckily, her maternal grandmother lives across the lake, but might as well be across the globe. In a quick turnaround of events, Emma finds herself back with a side of her family who calls her by another name, and a community of people who help to remind her of the mother she lost and the summers of years gone by.
All the comforts of Dessen’s writing remain. One of the elements of The Rest of the Story that I found most compelling was playing with the idea of a person returning to a place that knew only one very distant version of them. There is a photo displayed early on in the novel that depicts Emma as the only young child in a group smiling. While the image is only just that to Emma – an image – the snapshot of her from that period of her life, when she went by an entirely different name, Saylor, is one that she struggles to reconcile with for the rest of the novel.
In an interview with The New York Times, Dessen noted something that stuck we me about writing compelling YA stories. “Adolescence is a time of growth, so I don’t think you can write a true YA book without including various changes – both chosen and not – that you have to endure,” she said.
“Both chosen and not,” is something that Dessen balances in all of her novels, but especially so in The Rest of the Story. Circumstance informs a majority of life’s situations. Emma does not exactly choose to spend her summer reconnecting with a side of her family that reminds her of the experience of losing her mother (over and over) to her addiction. She does choose to let those people into her life and face the foggy details of her family history. Emma did not choose to go by a different name, Saylor, in her past, but here she must make that effort to see that person as part of herself.
While I’m growing further away from the age of Dessen’s leading women, I am not exactly done with her books. The Rest of the Story is another in a long line of novels that I find toes the line of what I’m losing touch with in most YA. And while I am also not the biggest fan of every literary property I cherish being adapted, Dessen’s Along for the Ride, This Lullaby, and Once and for All are the perfect trio to kickoff a Netflix run.
There’s no doubt that nostalgia plays a role when it comes to picking up a Dessen novel, but then again, there is nothing like knowing that you are going to walk away satisfied. As long as Sarah Dessen keeps writing, I will keep reading.
You can get your copy of The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local book store. Don’t forget to add it to your Goodreads shelf!
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