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Audience Pick!

Title: Just Listen
Author: Sarah Dessen
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Annabel has a best friend, a loving family, a modeling career on the side. But after a party one night at the end of her sophomore year, she loses her best friend and puts herself into exile over the summer. Then her family starts to fall apart when her sister refuses to eat, modeling becomes a chore, and the only person who will talk to her at school is an intimidating loner.

Review: This is heavier than This Lullaby and Along for the Ride. Not as much romance, but the handful of romantic scenes were great, as you’d expect from Dessen.

I liked the issues tackled in this story, but one thing kept me from rating this as high as the other Dessen books I’ve read: A chapter or scene would start with a sentence or a paragraph, then there was a flashback, sometimes for several pages, before it got back to the scene I had started. So when I got dumped back into the original scene, I was disoriented and it took me a while to get back into it.

If you like Dessen, I’m sure you’ll like this book. I did. It wasn’t my favorite of hers so far, but I still enjoyed it.

And I like how the book incorporated humor to balance out the heavy themes. Here’s a little snippet for you. It’s a flashback to when Annabel is 12. Her older sister Kirsten is complaining to their mom about how a new girl in town is shadowing Kirsten at the neighborhood pool:

“Kirsten,” my mother said now, “be nice.”

“Mom, I’ve tried that. But if you saw her, you’d understand. It’s strange.”

My mother took a sip of her wine. “Moving to a new place is difficult, you know. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends—”

“She obviously doesn’t,” Kirsten told her.

“—which means that it might be your job to meet her halfway,” my mother finished.

“She’s twelve,” Kirsten said, as if this was on par with being diseased, or on fire.

“So is your sister,” my father pointed out.

Kirsten picked up her fork and pointed it at him. “Exactly,” she said.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

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