But now, in the summer before college, Emaline wonders if perfect is good enough.Įnter Theo, a super-ambitious outsider, a New Yorker assisting on a documentary film about a reclusive local artist. He and Emaline have been together all through high school in Colby, the beach town where they both grew up. Dessen packs a lot into this novel, perhaps too much but Annabel and Owen's finely limned connection alone gives this novel staying power.Luke is the perfect boyfriend: handsome, kind, fun. Comparisons to Melinda, the heroine of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, are inevitable. But since Annabel " do confrontations," she swallows the truth until her attacker victimizes someone else. The heroine paints her problem as social ostracism, when really the situation is much more serious. Annabel sharply observes everyone's blinders, including most of her own with one disturbing exception. Flashbacks reveal that her unwanted status is the result of something that happened with the boyfriend of her ex-best friend, a vicious girl who believes "everyone had a place and it was her job to make sure you knew yours." What moves this story beyond problem novel fare is Dessen's nuanced characters, especially hulking Owen, another outcast who, in befriending Annabel, reminds her not to judge by appearances, while steeping her in his eclectic musical tastes. Annabel, who inherited this trait, nevertheless begins her junior year as a pariah. Their mother, Grace, operates in what Annabel wryly calls the "default Greene family mode," pretending everything is just fine. When middle sister Whitney follows to pursue a modeling career, the two clash, and Whitney returns home with a full-blown eating disorder. Oldest sister Kirsten, "the family powder keg," has left for New York. Predictably, the surface perfection masks trouble. Annabel Greene, who narrates, lives with her gorgeous sisters in a glass house designed by their architect father, in Dessen's (This Lullaby) familiar suburb of Lakeview.
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