The Truth About Forever

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: The Truth About Forever

After the death of her father, Macy retreated into studies and work, building a shell to hide behind to deal with his death. Similarly, her mother began to pick up more projects and refused to talk about what happened the day he died. But things are about to change this Summer. Macy makes the last-minute decision to work for the catering company Wish. Instead of meticulous schedules and predictable outcomes, working for Wish is chaotic and a bit...fun. Meeting new friends and breaking free of the shell she built for herself, Macy is going to realize that it is ok to let go and just be herself.

The Truth About Forever has a slow start. Sarah Dessen focused on building up Macy's relationship with her father to establish an emotional impact on his death, but this could have been done in fewer words. It took too long to reach the main storyline. Macy has enough lingering guilt and flashbacks of her father's death to make the reader understand her perspective without the extra at the beginning of the story.

Macy is not a strong female lead. She has a lot of development to accomplish in this novel, and it is a struggle the entire way for her to grow. There were quite a few moments where she let people walk over her and this didn't sit well with me. However, I do understand that this was the character and the emotions I felt over her choices were most likely the ones Sarah Dessen was aiming for.

The story was pretty linear, nothing that was too unpredictable. I thought the characters were believable and the situations they were in realistic, but the ending left too much out in the open. I didn't feel like it came full circle and there was no sense of closure. Not a book I would read again.