Review: The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen

The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
Published: May 1st, 2004
Publisher: Puffin
Pages: 374
Challenge: 100+ Reading Challenge, 350 Page Books Challenge
Other: NA
Buy the book: Bookdepository


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.

Sarah Dessen's magic formula is still working its way into girls hearts and The Truth About Forever was another good story. But if I'm being honest, the story lacked the spark that hooked me on Lock and Key and This Lullaby.

Macy is basically working for her mother when she needs her for her events, trying to keep up with her grades and to top that off, she has a boyfriend who has some intimacy issues. She's pretty stressed out when she has to take over her boyfriend's job at the library, because two of his friends are being less than friendly towards her. All of that changes when she decides to help out Wish when they are struggling to get everything done at the party Macy's mom is throwing. She helps out, and rolls into a job pretty quickly. It all takes from there when she realizes that she is now working with Wes, a lovely guy with his own problems.

I really liked reading the story, but the reason I didn't love it was because I didn't feel connected to the characters at all. Macy doesn't want Jason's job at the library, yet does it anyway and takes whatever crap his two female friends throw at her. If you don't want it, don't do it! I was very annoyed by that. What also didn't help was that I absolutely hated Jason's guts. He has some intimacy issues, sure, but he is downright rude to Macy when she tries to work on their relationship and only tries to make it up to her when it's too late.

I couldn't feel what the characters were feeling, something that Dessen brought across wonderfully in Lock and Key, immediately skyrocketing it to a spot among my favorite books ever. It missed a spark, and while I still liked it, I have to say that this is my least favorite Sarah Dessen book to date. I have three more of her books though, and I'll make sure to read the other three as well - because I think Sarah is a wonderful author. This book just didn't touch me like I wanted it to.

My overall rating:


Four stars for Macy and Wess - and hopefully a lot more stars for Sarah's other books :)