The Truth About Forever
Dessen, S.
2004
New York: Penguin
Age Range: 14+
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Rating: 4.5/5

Macy Queen is stuck without her boyfriend and with a dry job at (gasp) the public library for the summer, but she finds much better ways to fulfill her emotional and social needs when she meets raw, exciting folks associated with a peanut-gallery-esque catering company. With the help of her new friends, Macy learns how to deal not only with her own social anxieties and perfection complex, but also with the pain of her father's recent death.

The Truth About Forever was a difficult book for me to read; I lost my father at 18 and even though time has passed, Dessen's tone and direct, descriptive writing hit a very deep nerve for me. This is a stunning book about loss, about buried pain and self-flagellation, about sometimes sticking with people only because they're familiar, about being scared to meet new people, about that terror you feel when you're outside yourself, and ultimately about becoming who you really are. I can even forgive the negative stereotyping of the library as dust-dull, and for me, that takes effort!

A good, quick, emotional read that kept me interested until the very end!