Review: That Summer by Sarah Dessen

Where to begin...I was so very disappointed in this book. This is the first time I've read anything by Sarah Dessen and I'd heard so many good things about her books that I was looking forward to reading them all. Maybe this was the wrong one to start with, I'm not sure. I had to force myself to finish this one and I kept hoping it would get better at some point, but it never did. The characters were so whiny and unlikeable it was nearly impossible for me to keep reading. They were flawed, but not in a good way where there was some redeeming quality or where you could even relate to them. They were just annoying. The father who abandoned his family for the local weather girl and then didn't even tell his daughters about them having a new baby, but announced it on the local news first. The mother who moved on by staying out late nights dancing with middle aged men at a local bar and planning a trip to Europe with her friends which would leave her fifteen year old daughter on her own for a month. The sister who steamrolled her way across everyone and everything in her path and made everyone around her jumpy and miserable while they dealt with her "moods". The boy crazy best friend who came home from summer camp smoking, drinking, planning to run away with her new boyfriend and acted like she was worldly now that she had a boyfriend while her friend was so childish. I mean, I could keep going, but I don't really want to have them in my head anymore. Their voices in my head were so grating I understood why our main character finally cracked toward the end in one long and very bad day. I understood why she idealized the past and the one boy who seemed to make everything better. But even his plotline fell flat for me. We idealized him throughout the book through Haven's eyes and then in the last few pages made him out to be a bad guy? I mean, this entire story was so pointless to me. No real lessons learned, no real focus of the story other than one girl's endless summer of dealing with annoying family members and friends with no resolution to anything other than that she just had to deal with it. I cannot even wrap my head around the fact that I got through this book. I very rarely dislike a book this much so this is new for me, but I feel like this was such a waste of good reading time. I might try another of her more popular books just to give her one more chance, but honestly, I'm feeling a little burned by the hype right now.