A Summer of Change: The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen

Everything was supposed to stay the same -- despite the fact that college started in three months. But things started changing the summer before fall dawned upon them.

The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen follows Emaline, an eighteen-year-old girl who lives in Colby, a small beach town that comes to life during the summer. Emaline could not have wished for a better life. She had a mom, a dad (stepdad), two annoying older sisters (stepsisters), and the most perfect boyfriend -- all whom she loved dearly. She knew that her father (biological father) distanced himself from Emaline and her mother when she was just a newborn, and she came to accept that. But a part of her always wondered why he would not visit often. Growing up, she heard the bits and pieces -- how he was a scholar and attended an Ivy League, how he visited Colby one summer, met Emaline’s mom, and fled once he found out that she was pregnant. Occasionally, he and Emaline would exchange emails. This exchange, however, became more frequent once Emaline turned sixteen, simply to ask about college.

Now, Emaline was accepted into two colleges: East U, a local university, and Columbia, an Ivy League. Emaline would have never applied to Columbia had her father not promised to pay the entire tuition. While her father was well educated, her mother and everyone else in Colby rarely thought about college. In Colby, there was simply no need for a degree, especially for those in Emaline’s family. Starting in high school, she would already be in the workforce, working for her grandmother in Colby Realty, a real estate company that rents beach houses. Emaline knew not to trust her father with such big promises. Yet, she allowed herself to believe in the possibility, only to have it be crushed once her father retracted his offer with no explanation.

She moved on. She had a wonderful life without her father and was perfectly fine with that. After all, she had her boyfriend, Luke, who was the most perfect guy she could ask for. They had been together all through high school, that is, until the summer before college. But this was the summer when things turned upside down. Emaline’s father comes to visit Colby that summer, bringing along Benji, her ten year-old half-brother. To Emaline, this was her chance to confront her father, to ask why he retracted his offer, why he did not have an explanation. But do things go the way she plans?

Enter Theo, an ambitious assistant to a well-known movie director from New York, here for a project about Clyde Conaway, a local with a hidden talent. Desperate to open the world up to Clyde’s artwork, Theo and his boss, Ivy, disrupt the calmness of this beach town. Emaline runs into Theo as she is delivering outlandish delivery orders to their beach house, and Theo makes it his side project to get Emaline out of Colby, much like the ambitions of her father.

Emaline wants everything, yet, she can only have so much. Throughout this book, her priorities will be challenged, and she will need to decide who and what takes precedence in her life.

The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen was a great book. The plot of the book was more structured than Saint Anything, another Sarah Dessen book. The story moves in chronological order, and there was a clear and definitive peak of the story, followed by a resolution. Different from Saint Anything, however, was that the characters were underdeveloped. I had no idea what their personalities were like, as I only knew about what they did. For example, Emaline’s best friends, Morris and Daisy, were known as boy who was slow at everything and a girl who was a wonderful fashionista, respectively. While Emaline and Luke were well developed characters, having a better sense of Emaline’s friends would make the story more interesting and give it more dimension. Another thing that was disappointing was the book’s pace. The story begins slowly as Dessen provides us with many details about Emaline’s life. But to my dismay, the first hundred pages were all background information. The actual plot of the book does not begin until much later. From there, however, the book moves at a steady pace and becomes exciting and interesting. Overall, I would give this book a 10 out of 13 bologna slices.