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rainjrop's review against another edition
2.0
Hmmm.
So this book was 100 pages too long. 150.
I think the message I was supposed to get out of it related to a few ideas: the importance of family, the importance of stories and choosing the direction of your own story (life), and something about class difference. I’m finding it incredibly difficult to elaborate on any of those themes because in the end, there wasn’t that much depth to them.
The Rest of the Story also really emphasizes the importance of stories. Not only does the title reference this, but the novel is about Emma Saylor slowly uncovering the story of her mom’s side of the family, of her mom’s past, and of her own past, since she visited the lake as a young child. Much of the last part of the book focuses on Roo telling her stories about the pictures in an album. The problem with this is that it’s not interesting and I don’t care. I didn’t care about her mom’s life at the lake. I couldn’t get invested in the characters. Too much of the book was consumed with Emma Saylor feeling her way around, confusedly attending parties, and having awkward teenage conversations that weren’t important. I was never caught in a sense of mystery or the desire to reveal the unknown.
To speak to the book’s idea of taking control of your own story, see: Emma Saylor is afraid to drive because she once accidentally backed into a car. However, after being in a new environment with different family, she’s pushed into driving and after overcoming her fears, is able to drive through a hurricane. Good for her? Her character growth didn’t feel meaningful to me. Like Nick said, she was already a pretty good kid –after experiencing her mom’s addiction and dealing with her addiction-related death, she doesn’t drink. After drinking once, she immediately regrets it and plans to never do it again because it felt awful, she disappointed her dad, and she remembers how her mom was. #charactergrowth?
Okay. Sure. In the end, Emma Saylor feels a strong connection to her new family and wants the lake to be a part of her life, just like it was for her mom. I’m happy for her that she decided that. That’s nice. Good for her, making those decisions.
As for making a statement about class differences, I’m still not sure what statement was actually being made. In the end, the storm damages the Lake North side, putting the Club and the Tides out of commission after they didn’t prepare enough and assumed everything would be fine. Their sinking ship went down with the band still playing. On the other hand, the poorer Calvendar side of the lake prepped appropriately and experienced minor damage. The rich side of the lake is shown to be populated by rich douchbags out of touch with reality, while the poorer side is full of hard-working honest people just trying to get by. Okay. That’s some basic bitch stuff. What else have we got?
Well, after being dragged away from the poorer side, Emma Saylor has a completely miserable time on the rich side –it has absolutely no redeeming qualities and is in no way enjoyable. Everyone’s still a douchebag. Then, due to the storm damage, the important reconciliation/peace dinner between the two sides, Matt/Tracy/Nana/Emma Saylor and Mimi/Oxford/Bailey/Trinity/Jack/Roo/Celeste/Gordon, is forced over to the poor side of the lake. The dinner isn’t fancy, like it would’ve been at the club, but it’s prefect all the same. We also learn that Bailey, a poor-side girl who had a crush on a yacht club boy (who’s a douchbag), has instead gotten with the poor-side boy Vincent, who’s had a crush on her forever. The point I’m making here is that the rich side is shown to have no redeeming qualities and everyone on the poor side is happier associating with each other. What was I supposed to get out of this? Rich people suck? Stay with your own class? Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re happy? Only blue-collar people understand the true value of family? I don’t know, but that’s what I’m left with.
The plot moved very slowly, though I’d hesitate in the first place to say there was a plot. Instead, Emma Saylor wandered around the lake for four hundred pages, vaguely wistful. And ooh boy, that storm at the end. What kind of tacked on nonsense was that? In my opinion, the storm was a stupid plot device to get the reconciliation dinner over to the poor side in order to change the dynamic and take her father down a peg. By the time the storm was ramping up, the book had already been dragging for a generous handful of chapters and I wondered when and if it would ever end.
Speaking of Matt Pryce, Emma Saylor’s father, he seemed to pull a Jekyll and Hyde between his appearance in the very beginning of the book and then in the later chapters. I’m not sure if he didn’t have enough screen time in the beginning for us to get a good read on his character, but his attitude at the end of the book seems completely different. He comes off as a controlling dick. However, at the same time, I could empathize with him. The book is from Emma Saylor’s point of view, so we experience her dad’s freak out as if we were her. However, if you think about it from his point of view, it’s still an overreaction, but seems more reasonable.
Look at it this way: he sends his daughter off with relatives she’s essentially never met and when he sees her again a month later, she’s going by a different name, doesn’t want to leave, and has been partying with teens, college students, and alcohol. He’s having a hard time because he’s in his dead wife’s hometown, still living with the trauma he experienced from a relationship with an addict whose problems were enough to kill her and her best friend, more or less. He’s afraid his daughter, who has a genetic predisposition to addiction, may go down that same path. I get it. Even parents whose kid doesn’t have an addict in the family would freak out about their kid drinking underage with a bunch of randos. I’m not saying he necessarily handled it in the best way, but I get it.
For the seemingly all-important event of “staying with grandma Mimi” it turns out that Mimi is hardly in the book. It just seems a little weird. I guess Emma Saylor was connecting with her cousins instead. I guess chillin’ with grandma wasn’t really important?
As for the “romance” with Roo, I guess it didn’t occur to me that it was romance. It was a foregone conclusion. Whilst reading, I honestly never thought of their interactions as a “developing romance” or anything along those lines. If Dessen was trying to throw us off with Blake, I don’t even know why she bothered. Perhaps it was just so we could get the “I’m just convenient” speech out there.
Characters who could’ve been cut and no one would’ve noticed and it would make no difference to the story: Mimi, Oxford, Jack/Jake/Josh/whatever his name is (Bailey’s brother), Taylor, April, Hannah, Celeste.
And to wrap it up, let’s discuss the writing. It was fine. Serviceable. Except for this one particular sentence structure that popped up over and over and over again. It wasn’t as noticeable when I was reading the book, but when I listened to the audiobook it was incredibly prominent and very quickly became annoying. The problem is murdering conjunctions and replacing them with commas. I didn’t write any quotes down, but I can come up with some similar examples:
Also, there’s a lot of superfluous descriptions of things. I feel like I know the Calvandar family toaster better than I do some of the characters: it was purchased by Seargant, it’s shiny, it has multiple bread slots, it has a dial to adjust the settings, it is used very often, and a red light goes on when it’s toasting so that you know it’s working. Riveting.
In the end, this novel was much like the white, buttered toast that featured so prominently: kind of bland, run of the mill, basic, appeals to the widest possible audience, not filling or satisfying, forgettable, and gone in a flash.
So this book was 100 pages too long. 150.
I think the message I was supposed to get out of it related to a few ideas: the importance of family, the importance of stories and choosing the direction of your own story (life), and something about class difference. I’m finding it incredibly difficult to elaborate on any of those themes because in the end, there wasn’t that much depth to them.
Spoiler
Regarding the importance of family. At some point, Bailey says something along the lines of, “We’re not friends, we’re family,” or “I care about you because you’re my family.” While of course I don’t expect a single book to contain or explore ever iteration of family dynamics, it grated on my nerves a bit, this expectation that you are immediately obligated to care about someone because they’re family. I don’t believe that someone is obligated to care about or interact with someone just because they’re related by blood. People are way too complicated for that kind of oversimplifying attitude, particularly when family members can be toxic and harm you just by being in your life. Bleh.The Rest of the Story also really emphasizes the importance of stories. Not only does the title reference this, but the novel is about Emma Saylor slowly uncovering the story of her mom’s side of the family, of her mom’s past, and of her own past, since she visited the lake as a young child. Much of the last part of the book focuses on Roo telling her stories about the pictures in an album. The problem with this is that it’s not interesting and I don’t care. I didn’t care about her mom’s life at the lake. I couldn’t get invested in the characters. Too much of the book was consumed with Emma Saylor feeling her way around, confusedly attending parties, and having awkward teenage conversations that weren’t important. I was never caught in a sense of mystery or the desire to reveal the unknown.
To speak to the book’s idea of taking control of your own story, see: Emma Saylor is afraid to drive because she once accidentally backed into a car. However, after being in a new environment with different family, she’s pushed into driving and after overcoming her fears, is able to drive through a hurricane. Good for her? Her character growth didn’t feel meaningful to me. Like Nick said, she was already a pretty good kid –after experiencing her mom’s addiction and dealing with her addiction-related death, she doesn’t drink. After drinking once, she immediately regrets it and plans to never do it again because it felt awful, she disappointed her dad, and she remembers how her mom was. #charactergrowth?
Okay. Sure. In the end, Emma Saylor feels a strong connection to her new family and wants the lake to be a part of her life, just like it was for her mom. I’m happy for her that she decided that. That’s nice. Good for her, making those decisions.
As for making a statement about class differences, I’m still not sure what statement was actually being made. In the end, the storm damages the Lake North side, putting the Club and the Tides out of commission after they didn’t prepare enough and assumed everything would be fine. Their sinking ship went down with the band still playing. On the other hand, the poorer Calvendar side of the lake prepped appropriately and experienced minor damage. The rich side of the lake is shown to be populated by rich douchbags out of touch with reality, while the poorer side is full of hard-working honest people just trying to get by. Okay. That’s some basic bitch stuff. What else have we got?
Well, after being dragged away from the poorer side, Emma Saylor has a completely miserable time on the rich side –it has absolutely no redeeming qualities and is in no way enjoyable. Everyone’s still a douchebag. Then, due to the storm damage, the important reconciliation/peace dinner between the two sides, Matt/Tracy/Nana/Emma Saylor and Mimi/Oxford/Bailey/Trinity/Jack/Roo/Celeste/Gordon, is forced over to the poor side of the lake. The dinner isn’t fancy, like it would’ve been at the club, but it’s prefect all the same. We also learn that Bailey, a poor-side girl who had a crush on a yacht club boy (who’s a douchbag), has instead gotten with the poor-side boy Vincent, who’s had a crush on her forever. The point I’m making here is that the rich side is shown to have no redeeming qualities and everyone on the poor side is happier associating with each other. What was I supposed to get out of this? Rich people suck? Stay with your own class? Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re happy? Only blue-collar people understand the true value of family? I don’t know, but that’s what I’m left with.
The plot moved very slowly, though I’d hesitate in the first place to say there was a plot. Instead, Emma Saylor wandered around the lake for four hundred pages, vaguely wistful. And ooh boy, that storm at the end. What kind of tacked on nonsense was that? In my opinion, the storm was a stupid plot device to get the reconciliation dinner over to the poor side in order to change the dynamic and take her father down a peg. By the time the storm was ramping up, the book had already been dragging for a generous handful of chapters and I wondered when and if it would ever end.
Speaking of Matt Pryce, Emma Saylor’s father, he seemed to pull a Jekyll and Hyde between his appearance in the very beginning of the book and then in the later chapters. I’m not sure if he didn’t have enough screen time in the beginning for us to get a good read on his character, but his attitude at the end of the book seems completely different. He comes off as a controlling dick. However, at the same time, I could empathize with him. The book is from Emma Saylor’s point of view, so we experience her dad’s freak out as if we were her. However, if you think about it from his point of view, it’s still an overreaction, but seems more reasonable.
Look at it this way: he sends his daughter off with relatives she’s essentially never met and when he sees her again a month later, she’s going by a different name, doesn’t want to leave, and has been partying with teens, college students, and alcohol. He’s having a hard time because he’s in his dead wife’s hometown, still living with the trauma he experienced from a relationship with an addict whose problems were enough to kill her and her best friend, more or less. He’s afraid his daughter, who has a genetic predisposition to addiction, may go down that same path. I get it. Even parents whose kid doesn’t have an addict in the family would freak out about their kid drinking underage with a bunch of randos. I’m not saying he necessarily handled it in the best way, but I get it.
For the seemingly all-important event of “staying with grandma Mimi” it turns out that Mimi is hardly in the book. It just seems a little weird. I guess Emma Saylor was connecting with her cousins instead. I guess chillin’ with grandma wasn’t really important?
As for the “romance” with Roo, I guess it didn’t occur to me that it was romance. It was a foregone conclusion. Whilst reading, I honestly never thought of their interactions as a “developing romance” or anything along those lines. If Dessen was trying to throw us off with Blake, I don’t even know why she bothered. Perhaps it was just so we could get the “I’m just convenient” speech out there.
Characters who could’ve been cut and no one would’ve noticed and it would make no difference to the story: Mimi, Oxford, Jack/Jake/Josh/whatever his name is (Bailey’s brother), Taylor, April, Hannah, Celeste.
And to wrap it up, let’s discuss the writing. It was fine. Serviceable. Except for this one particular sentence structure that popped up over and over and over again. It wasn’t as noticeable when I was reading the book, but when I listened to the audiobook it was incredibly prominent and very quickly became annoying. The problem is murdering conjunctions and replacing them with commas. I didn’t write any quotes down, but I can come up with some similar examples:
“They were standing on the board walk, the waves behind them.”
“I ate breakfast, the toast brown.”
“I was uncomfortable, the mood broken.”
“Why is this book like this, the writing bad?”
Also, there’s a lot of superfluous descriptions of things. I feel like I know the Calvandar family toaster better than I do some of the characters: it was purchased by Seargant, it’s shiny, it has multiple bread slots, it has a dial to adjust the settings, it is used very often, and a red light goes on when it’s toasting so that you know it’s working. Riveting.
In the end, this novel was much like the white, buttered toast that featured so prominently: kind of bland, run of the mill, basic, appeals to the widest possible audience, not filling or satisfying, forgettable, and gone in a flash.
emilylind's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
neverseen's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
cornkobz's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
juugp's review against another edition
4.0
I haven't loved Dessen's latest books, so this was a welcome return to what she does best - it felt like I was reading a new version of The Truth About Forever, my personal favorite. I don't think that's supposed to be a good thing, but it turned out to be just what I wanted from her novels.
callieju's review against another edition
5.0
Loved it! Great book teen book about figuring out your identity and who you are. The romance was adorable and kept me wanting to read more.
marinas_world's review against another edition
5.0
I forgot how much I loved this book! The whole story was perfect to me, and The whole ending made me want to cry! Really glad I chose to re-read this!
siyuan_cao's review against another edition
3.0
3⭐️
This book was wholesome and the summer vibes were immaculate
This book was wholesome and the summer vibes were immaculate
mehsi's review against another edition
5.0
“After loving someone you couldn’t depend on, you realize how important it is to trust someone will do what they say. It’s such a simple thing, not to promise what you can’t or won’t deliver. But my mom had done that all the time.”
Been trying for some time to write a review, but I just can't get the words out. Since this one is for a reading club on Hebban.nl (thanks again) I do have to write a short review at least, so here we go.
Meet Saylor (I am still snorting at that name) or Emma as she is also called, when plans are cancelled she goes to stay with her mom's family who she hasn't seen in ages. A summer full of memories, family, and of course romance (EEEEP, it was just so fabulous and I was rooting for her to get together with that guy and then later I was eagerly reading about all the things they did and how he helped her discover more about her past/family) begins. I just loved reading about the little town and the lake, about the things Saylor did (she was so happy to help out no matter that it was also a vacation for her), how she discovered herself and learned more about her and her family's history, we read about Saylor's mom and what happened to her and how it wasn't just something that happened, it always was there. The ending was also terrific. I just wasn't a fan of the dad. He was just so obtuse. Same goes for the grandma though I did like her a bit more. I just wasn't a fan how she just seemed to throw her money around. Yes, you have a lot, no need to show off.
Oh, and I just love it when the title makes its appearance in the story.
So yes, I flew through this book and I would highly recommend it to all looking for a fantastic summer read. It is the book to read at the moment, at least in my opinion.
Review first posted at https://twirlingbookprincess.com/
Been trying for some time to write a review, but I just can't get the words out. Since this one is for a reading club on Hebban.nl (thanks again) I do have to write a short review at least, so here we go.
Meet Saylor (I am still snorting at that name) or Emma as she is also called, when plans are cancelled she goes to stay with her mom's family who she hasn't seen in ages. A summer full of memories, family, and of course romance (EEEEP, it was just so fabulous and I was rooting for her to get together with that guy and then later I was eagerly reading about all the things they did and how he helped her discover more about her past/family) begins. I just loved reading about the little town and the lake, about the things Saylor did (she was so happy to help out no matter that it was also a vacation for her), how she discovered herself and learned more about her and her family's history, we read about Saylor's mom and what happened to her and how it wasn't just something that happened, it always was there. The ending was also terrific. I just wasn't a fan of the dad. He was just so obtuse. Same goes for the grandma though I did like her a bit more. I just wasn't a fan how she just seemed to throw her money around. Yes, you have a lot, no need to show off.
Oh, and I just love it when the title makes its appearance in the story.
So yes, I flew through this book and I would highly recommend it to all looking for a fantastic summer read. It is the book to read at the moment, at least in my opinion.
Review first posted at https://twirlingbookprincess.com/