Just Listen

This was the first book I ever read by Sarah Dessen and I love it! I completely related to the importance of music and it’s affect on a person. All of her stories are perfect summer reads. While there’s important issues brought up in each story, you can always count on a happily ever after!

A poorly done audiobook narration for a triggering teenage melodrama

Annabel is a 16-year-old girl who has spent years trying to be a Good Girl who never gives her mother, who has a history of clinical depression, any reason to fall into another deep, dark episode of mental illness. However, no such concern enters the mind of her 18-year-old sister, Whitney, who also suffers from a mental illness, anorexia, with associated depression, which is expressed as resentment and rage toward her mother. It is not until Whitney has become a virtual skeleton and vomited up blood that her clueless parents notice she’s sick and rush her to the residential placement she desperately needs.

In addition to her overwhelming home life, for the past four years Annabel has fallen into the clutches of a girl named Sophie. In her preteen and early teen years, Sophie was a controlling termagant of a Mean Girl, but over the past year, since she took a lover, she has morphed into a cruelly jealous avenger who stalks and vandalizes any girl whom she decides has flirted with her boyfriend. Sophie is clearly a future, sociopathic Bunny Boiler in the making.

At the start of the book, Annabel is in a grueling state of anxiety and depression as she faces the first day of the school year. We are given to understand that some very recent event, which is not described in Annabel’s tortured thoughts at that point in the novel, has occurred which has caused vindictive Sophie to declare that Annabel is a “slut” who has attempted to seduce Sophie’s boyfriend. Sophie is presented as having so much social power in their public high school that she has been able, by sheer force of her domineering personality, to render Annabel a disgraced outcast—and not one word is said by any teacher or administrative staff against Sophie’s overt bullying. In her pariah state, Annabel gradually forms a friendship with a self-isolated, alienated loner named Owen, who is in her junior class, but with whom she has never associated before.

Owen was arrested a while back for assault, because of getting in a fist fight, and the juvenile court judge sentenced him to mandatory anger-management therapy. When Owen forms a relationship with Annabel, it is more that of a mentor than a potential romantic partner, as he impulsively shares with her what he has learned in therapy, in particular, how crucial it is, if one hopes to have any healthy relationships, to be authentic and tell the truth. This is a hugely difficult concept for Annabel to grasp, as a lifelong, people-pleasing doormat.

This is an extremely drawn out, YA novel about a painfully passive protagonist in a family overrun with people suffering from mental illness, herself included. But though Annabel’s mother and sister are offered the mental health assistance (counseling and medication) that they require, poor, pathetic Annabel is left out in the cold. Both of her parents are oblivious of the fact that, ever since her mother’s deep depression several years ago, Annabel has been very obviously suffering from an anxiety disorder. She is also currently very clearly suffering from PTSD (which it is extremely easy to guess right from the start is due to an unreported sexual assault), as well as the subsequent, brutal, “blame the victim” bullying by evil Sophie. But, as always, Annabel’s pain is invisible to her parents, who continually, unquestioningly accept her stoic plodding through life as a sign that all is well with her. And just because Annabel is befriended by an equally socially alienated boy (the “romance” plot of the novel) does not make it any less horrifying that the only mental health assistance Annabel receives throughout the entirety of the novel is secondhand from Owen.

The sole exception to the overriding gloom of the bulk of this novel is the occasional appearance of Owen’s bubbly, 12-year-old sister, Mallory, who is a real treat.

As seems to be typical for Dessen’s teen books, in this novel, there is frequent underage drunkenness at unsupervised keg parties, underage sex presented as normal and typical, and responsible, caring, supervisory adults are nonexistent.

Trigger Warning: While all of the consensual sexual contact in this YA novel occurs offstage, the non-consensual sex occurs onstage, and is described in vivid, gut-wrenching, violent detail.

In short, I perceived this book as a long, painful slog of almost unrelieved misery, until the very end of the book, when the author ties a pretty, pink, metaphorical bow around all the intense, melodramatic issues raised in the story and declares them solved, in an irritatingly, unmotivated manner.

I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, which I do not recommend, for two main reasons. First, having someone narrate this book at one-fifth the speed it takes to read text on the page drags it out to almost 12 hours (!!!). Second, the narrator, Jennifer Ikeda, is not very good with male voices. She performs Owen’s dialogue at such a high pitch, it reminds me unpleasantly of a cartoon chipmunk.

I rate this book as follows:

Heroine: 3 stars
Romantic Interest: 3 stars
Subcharacters: 3 stars
Romance Plot: 3 stars
Evil Best Friend Plot: 2 stars
Family, Mental-Health, Melodrama Plot: 2 stars
Writing: 3 stars
Audiobook Narration: 3 stars
Overall: 3 stars

Okay so this was not among my favorites of Sarah Dessen’s books but that’s okay because I’m still glad I read it. I wasn’t sure I was going to get all the way through, but I’m glad I stuck to it because it was a good read to say the least. I was often thinking why doesn’t Annabel just come out and tell Owen and her friends what happened to her at the party? Maybe because I thankfully was never in her sort of situation and under those circumstances that I didn’t understand why or couldn’t really connect/relate to her. Also she is/was a model and that world didn’t really have any appeal to me.
I liked the scenes with Annabel and Owen the most; I thought he was a good character, and his little sister Mallory was a delight as well. I loved the scene at the club where Annabel meets Remy and Dexter and his band, two characters whom I fondly remember from This Lullaby. And I really wasn’t fond of Sophie, Annabel’s ex-friend, even more so by the end of the book.
All in all, I didn’t love it but didn’t hate it either.

I found this book on my college-aged daughters bookshelf & decided to read it. I have always been fond of young adult novels. While I wouldn’t say it was my favorite, I did enjoy it. I felt it was thought provoking and not too deep- I wasn’t in the mood for a particularity heavy duty book. I appreciated the characters- although at times it was frustrating that the characters were not doing what they “should” do… but I am not longer 18 and how young people treat sexual assault is definitely a hot item right now. There was much more to this book than I had thought originally.

i love her books i am such a huge fan im starting to collect all her books, i will read them over and over again and they never get old