Book 3 Review

Just Listen Book Review

By: Savannah Butt

Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen is not your typical romance story. It has tragedy and hard life experiences added into it. This book is romance but is also somewhat adrenaline fiction. It’s about a girl named Annabel Greene who seems like she has everything, that is when she is in front of the camera. But she is actually going through some really tough times trying to deal with her sister’s eating disorder and her now ex-best friend. She is also holding in that she was sexually assaulted and is now effecting how she deals with the outside world.

During this book Annabel meets a boy named Owen who is mysterious and dark. She thought he would be scarier as a person, but when she gets to know him, he actually very honest and not scary at all. He introduces her to what he calls “good music” in which she can be “enlightened” and express herself through the music. The music helps her cope with her troubles but it’s not enough. She is overwhelmed that Sophie’s (her ex-best friend) boyfriend sexually assaulted her and that was the reason why her Sophie weren’t friends anymore. She had to tell somebody, but she just didn’t know how to tell anyone.“ ‘The kind who live for music and are constantly seeking it out, anywhere they can. Who can’t imagine a life without it. They’re enlightened.’ ” (Dessen 96). The main characters are Annabel and Owen since they spend so much time together. But it also focuses in on Annabel’s family and how they are dealing with Whitney’s (her middle sister) eating disorder. The main theme of the book is to not isolate yourself from the outside world and to tell somebody if something terrible has gone wrong in your life even if you think they won’t understand. The voice of the book is Annabel, it follows only her thoughts and perspectives on the events she goes through and is in first person.

Just Listen gets your adrenaline rushing in some parts, but in some of the other’s it is hard to follow what she is trying to say. Also the writing of Annabel’s thoughts were sometimes put into sentences that were hard to understand or didn’t make sense. But the reader is able to connect to the book well as every teenager has drama in his or her life and they could relate to how she was feeling. A lot of teenagers could relate to how she kept things in, as she didn’t want to make any more hardships within her family so she just kept thing to herself. Just listen starts with one confusion and is then added onto by one more after another until it is one big ball of confusion that ready to explode at any moment. “ ‘You deal with it?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know how to do that.’ ”(Dessen 151). The purpose of this novel is to show teenagers that there other people out there who are going through the same thing and that you can find a solution or learn how to deal with it. The novel’s strengths are the themes; Dessen is able to get the themes through pretty clearly to the reader. In Just Listen Annabel has lost her best friend Sophie because Sophie thought her boyfriend cheated on her with Annabel, but really he sexually assaulted her. Dessen kept this a secret until Annabel would have flashbacks every once in a while that would describe the scene in bits and pieces until the very end. While this is going one she can’t tell anyone because at home her parents have their hands full with her middle sister, Whitney’s eating disorder. Dessen could have given a better description of how Whitney’s progress was going but she did give good imagery of how severe the condition was. But Annabel has Owen who is helping her cope with these conditions and helping her open up and be honest to the world, to be herself.

I give this book a 4 out of 5 stars because it made me want to read more to find out the reason why she was isolating herself. But there could have been better character development and more description of their lives. I would have liked to see how the rest of Annabel and Owen’s relationship went. But the book had a great plot and did a good job of getting your adrenaline rushing and making you want more. It gave a simile of how Annabel’s life was like a house with many windows letting people see into their life looking like a happy family who has everything but in the places where windows weren’t there was the real story of her life.