The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen

 

After I finished Once and For All last month, I immediately placed The Rest of the Story on hold. I'm still riding high on the idea that Sarah Dessen is the queen of teen and that her books are wonderful gems in a sea of limestone.  Am I right? Stay tuned!

Emma Saylor's dad has remarried and she needs someplace to stay while he's on his honeymoon. She ends up staying with her maternal grandmother at North Lake despite having no relationship to this woman, the mother of her own dead mother.  While at North Lake, Emma feels split in two in a variety of ways, but the center of it is that Emma hasn't dealt with the death of her mother and here, in the arms of her mother's family, she feels uncertain of who and what she is.  Oh, and there's a romance.

Here's what I think. I'm no longer Dessen's target audience. Why would I be? I'm more than forty years old and these teenage dramas are ridiculous to me. I want to actually know more about the story from the perspective of the adults.  I mean, how does Emma's grandmother feel about Emma just coming in and crashing? How does she feel about all these teenage kids running around, drinking and partying all the time?  

I would LOVE if this was the prequel to Dessen writing a love story about Emma and Roo, her crush, but like twenty years from the ending. Let's say Emma's been to college, gotten married and divorced, and is now a successful writer. She goes back to North Lake to stay for a writing retreat and discovers that Roo is a recovering drug addict who has custody of some obscure relative's young child.  Now that is a book I'd like to read.  

What I don't want to read is Dessen's take on a lot of hard issues, but not doing any of them any justice. The brilliance of Just Listen is that Annabelle's issues are all because of a rape.  The brilliance of Dreamland is that Caitlin's issues all stem from domestic violence.  Dessen gives each of these incredibly complex topics time to develop and the deep dive into the consequences of each character's own trauma is exploratory and nuanced. In The Rest of the Story, Dessen tries to grapple with the death of a parent (with multiple characters!), addiction, class issues, and anxiety. I agree that someone's summer vacation might actually bring up all these issues, but that would make for a much longer, much more depressing read. I thought that the ending actually did each issue a disservice and made me wade into despair, rather than making you think that there's hope for rebounding from trauma.  

So, no.  I don't need to read any more Dessen. I love some of her books and I know she can write characters who stick with you, but I'm not going to hold my breath that she'll be doing it again any time soon.