‘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.’

I’m a lit­tle hes­i­tant to write a less than glow­ing review, given how beloved Dessen’s nov­els are, but I just don’t think this is an author for me. That’s not to say Dessen isn’t a good writer — I fin­ished The Truth About For­ever in about 4 hours and was com­pelled to keep read­ing through to the end. I just found the whole story pretty underwhelming.

I should point out con­tem­po­rary fic­tion is not some­thing I read a lot of, mainly because I don’t usu­ally find it that inter­est­ing — unless it is very hard-hitting and gritty — so per­haps I’m not the best per­son to judge these par­tic­u­lar books. I would define Dessen’s nov­els as a light sum­mer read with more weight than most. To be fair — I think she tack­les sub­jects like grief well, while at the same time not allow­ing the story to become depress­ing — a dif­fi­cult bal­ance to maintain.

Unfor­tu­nately, I found the char­ac­ters pretty for­get­table, espe­cially Macy. I know she was numb as a way to cop­ing with her father’s death but I have to admit I found her very dull as a con­se­quence and found her jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of Jason’s behav­iour frustrating. I did like Kristy and Bert but for a book of this length I would have liked to have explored the other char­ac­ters in a lot more depth. Wes was nice enough, but didn’t leave much of an impres­sion and I never felt any sort of spark or chem­istry between him and Macy. Their rela­tion­ship just sort of… hap­pened. This is a very char­ac­ter dri­ven book with very lit­tle plot — and sadly I just didn’t con­nect with Macy.

Ulti­mately, Dessen’s writ­ing just doesn’t have enough impact for me. If an author is tack­ling a dif­fi­cult sub­ject — like the loss of a par­ent — I pre­fer a raw, pow­er­ful novel. The Truth About For­ever was just too sedate for me — and though I was intrigued to see Macy finally con­front the loss of her father and assert her­self — it was a long time com­ing and in the end, some­what anti-climatic. While I doubt I will be pick­ing up any of Dessen’s other books any­time soon — I would cer­tainly rec­om­mend her. Dessen is a tal­ented writer, whose sto­ries often con­tain an impor­tant mes­sage for teenagers — and there aren’t any other YA books quite like hers. Def­i­nitely worth a read.

Rat­ing: 6/10

Check out some other reviews:

Con­fes­sions of a Book Addict

For­ever Young Adult

Katie’s Book Blog