To Remy, the main character in the story, her lack of faith in relationships and love is reasonably based on her own personal experiences, on what she has witnessed all through her life. Things have always to be in control because a step to an unknown direction will lose the balance that one keeps or at least hopes to maintain.
But to a cynic, everything has measures, standards and requirements. I’m a living testimony to this philosophy or more like a fact of life. To truly live life is to always make risks. "This Lullaby" was by no means a bad book, it was a fast and engaging story, but it left me fairly unsatisfied and not really inspired to read any other books by the author. Throughout the book I kept thinking that if you take the words "high school graduation" and "college" out of the story, you basically get on your hands a group of "Sex and the City" girls. Maybe I would have understood her better if her personality was explored more thoroughly: Why exactly was she so angry with her father, after all, he never did her any harm, he died when she was just a toddler? What made her clean up her act and abandon her promiscuous life style and drug use? Why, with all her disillusionment in love, did she keep having these 2-months romances? What exactly did she want from these relationships? I also wanted to know more about Remy's friends, especially about always in a background Jess, and about Chloe, who was as cynical as Remy, but what was her reason? And lastly, these 4 girls seemed strangely too mature and jaded for their age. For her 18 years of age she was awfully negative and cynical and I found it very hard at times to remain in her head, because it seemed to me she never took any pleasure in anything, even in her short relationship with Dexter. Remy appeared a little harder to understand and appreciate.
Dexter as the main male lead was extremely likable. They were compelling and understandable and their relationships with each other felt real. The characters were very well drawn in comparison to those in many other YA novels I've read. There was really nothing wrong with this story. Rather, it was a story of a girl disillusioned in love who finally allowed herself to open herself up to an honest relationship with a man. This book is normally described as a super sweet romance, but it never felt like one to me. It has nothing to do with the writing, but this kind of fairly depressing YA chick lit a la Jennifer Weiner is simply not my cup of tea. "This Lullaby" was my first Dessen book and will probably be the last.
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