Review - The Truth About Forever

Title: The Truth About Forever
Author: Sarah Dessen
Publisher: Puffer Books - Penguin Publishing
Pages: 374 (paperback)
Rating: 5.0 !!!

Description: Goodreads

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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.

My Review:

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I picked up this book, pretty much knowing that I was going to enjoy it tremendously. Sarah Dessen really is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I’d already heard more than a handful of great things about this book. Like nearly every other book that I’ve read of Dessen’s, I fell in love with her main character. Macy, in so many ways made me feel close to her. She was just one of those characters that you felt like you yourself needed to be there for her. Every time I put the book down to go do other things, I felt like I should be there, going along with the story with her. And that’s exactly how Dessen makes me feel every single time that I read one of her books; her characters literally coming to life.

The Truth About Forever was different than some of the other books to me. Though most books can have slow spots, I felt like this one had a few too many. Now, this of course wasn’t the worst thing, since in the end everything came out perfectly and flowed together. There was also just too many positive things about this book that made the slow moments seem unnoticeable. While some scenes seemed as though they were dragging, I did find certain scenes to wiz by, ending quicker than I wanted (Though in a good way!). From the very first time that we were truly introduced to Wes and saw what kind of person that he was, I just got this type of fluttering in my heart, wanting scenes with Macy and other people to end so that I could get another taste of Wes. He really was the pure image of the guy that every girl wants to have at some point in her life. Dessen most definitely gets two thumbs up in her well-formed and extremely realistic characters.

Wes can easily be seen as this amazing guy from the very beginning. He had a great back story, and his situation, which was similar to Macy’s, would make anyone want to just jump into the book to comfort him. Macy and he very obviously have a type of bond unlike any other characters in this book which is why I enjoyed scenes between the two of them more than any other. Macy was also a character I love (as I stated in the above). What I mostly enjoyed was the realness, and the rawness of how Macy handled the grief behind her father’s death. I feel like in books that deal with major deaths like that, characters aren’t given the right kind of reaction, but this…this was absolutely flawless.

Reading this book has really reminded me of how much I missed the normal romance pureness of Dessen’s books. How each page that’s turned makes you feel that ‘yes, there are such things as fairytales!’ Every time I read one of Dessen’s books I think that way, instantly in a powerfully optimistic state where I’m smiling for a couple hours (maybe even a whole day) after finishing the book. So for this review…I really have nothing bad to say. I enjoyed this book from its very first page to it’s very last; period. (: