Sarah Dessen has a wonderful sense of the teen psyche. Though I was never a teen from a Dessen novel, I went to high school with a lot of them. I do adore her for that. But I don't know if it was this book itself, of if this was merely the book that made me notice it, but Dessen has an affection for flashbacks. And not even flashbacks into the characters' backstory, but rather the narrative technique for starting a scene and having a character think back to something that happened the previous day/week, then, after several pages, landing ungracefully back into the opening moment. All through this book, I felt jerked like I was on a fishing line. But I loved the story and the characters enough to wade through the frequent disorientations that came from Dessen's narrative style. I might even read more, but that back and forth will continue to bother me nevertheless.
