#3 Coming of Age: Someone Like You

Annotation:

Away at camp, Haley is surprised by a call from her best friend, Scarlett, desperately asking her to return home early. Shocked by the wavering in the voice of her usually strong and supportive friend, Haley realizes her best friend needs her now more than ever, and she will do whatever it takes to be there for her.

Justification for non-nomination:

Haley finds out that Scarlet’s boyfriend has just been killed in a motorcycle accident. To make an ugly situation even worse, Scarlett finds out she is pregnant with his child. As Haley embarks on her quest for identity in her own life, she also becomes the support for her friend through this teenage pregnancy, which inevitably forces both girls to face adulthood in a very early and dramatic way.

Though Dessen has an incredible ability to intertwine various issues together and make them fit cohesively throughout the story, it seemed incredibly predictable and lacking in some areas. This may have been the adult voice in my head so I ventured to look at it through my teen lens. I can agree, however, that Dessen touches on many of the adolescent hallmarks that accompany that fine line between childhood and adulthood including friendships, parents, boys, alcohol and drug use, sex, and teen pregnancy.

Dessen writes the story from Haley’s point of view and through this telling, she is able to completely own the teenage perspective including leaving the parents and adults mostly in the background while the teens try to navigate and understand their own individual worlds. This perspective allows the reader to better understand the situations and decisions being made by Haley, but it also limits the reader in having a fully dimensional understanding of the characters in any other way than through the eyes of a teenage girl.  Each character within the story, all the way down to their actions, mimic the way a teen would feel and perceive an adult, a friend, a parent, a boy and in some cases, even other girls they feel threatened by. This may or not have been the point Dessen was trying to drive home in the book, but it left little to the imagination and may have contributed to the lack of depth in the storyline.

This book is a very easy read and would appeal to YA girls for sure. The cover of the book itself does not seem to fit the story at all.  After finishing the book, I questioned why and how that cover was relevant to the story.  Parents may cringe a little at the topics discussed and the life lessons being learned, but as an adult reading this book, it helps bring you back to the mindset of a teenager through the thoughts and the situations that Haley experiences.

Genre Catalog: Coming of Age, Realistic/Edgy/Problem Novel