Book review: The Moon and More

The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen

Description from Goodreads (below) can be found here along with other reviews.

Luke is the perfect boyfriend: handsome, kind, fun. He and Emaline have been together all through high school in Colby, the beach town where they both grew up. But now, in the summer before college, Emaline wonders if perfect is good enough.

Enter Theo, a super-ambitious outsider, a New Yorker assisting on a documentary film about a reclusive local artist. Theo's sophisticated, exciting, and, best of all, he thinks Emaline is much too smart for Colby.

Emaline's mostly-absentee father, too, thinks Emaline should have a bigger life, and he's convinced that an Ivy League education is the only route to realizing her potential. Emaline is attracted to the bright future that Theo and her father promise. But she also clings to the deep roots of her loving mother, stepfather, and sisters. Can she ignore the pull of the happily familiar world of Colby?

Emaline wants the moon and more, but how can she balance where she comes from with where she's going?

I love Sarah Dessen. So I was super pumped to get her new book, which came out earlier this summer. I'm not sure I can write a review without being super gushy and fangirling hardcore. But I'll try.

Emaline, the main character of The Moon and More, has just graduated high school and is about to go off to college -- the first in her family, other than her estranged biological father. As she lives out her last summer in her beachfront hometown, she deals with the reappearance of her bio father in her life, the end of her relationship with her long-time high school sweetheart, the shifting of her relationships with her other family members, and with being a permanent member of a community where many people are only temporary -- and discovering that, with her planned departure at the end of the summer, she had become temporary too.

I loved the relationships in this book -- from Emaline's relationship with her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend Luke to the half-brother who is suddenly suuuper attached to the sudden connection to a local artist, I thought they were all so true to life. You'll think Dessen stole them from YOUR life.

There were parts of this novel I cringed -- in that painful kind of way you get when you see someone embarrassing themselves (the way that makes it impossible for me to watch "The Christmas Story"). But isn't that so like life?

Sarah Dessen has often said that she hates trying to answer the question, "What is your book about?" because she ends up rambling on and on, and that's how I feel now. I think because SO MUCH happens in the book and you feel guilty leaving any piece of it out. So I'm not sure there's any more that I can say.

The Moon and More is another home run from Sarah Dessen. I happily gave it four stars and will probably be reading it again soon.

(Interesting side note -- The Moon and More was the third official title of this book. Dessen's first try was "The Best After Ever" but she and her publishers worried people would mix it up and say the best ever after. Then it was "Someone Else's Summer" but they worried bookstores would remove it from shelves at the end of the season.)

Have any of you read The Moon and More? What did you think?