2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESTY OF UNC-TV
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DISCOVERING WHO WE ARE a review by Angela Love Moser Sarah Dessen. The Rest of the Story. HarperCollins, 2019.
ANGEL A LOVE MOSER earned her BA in English and History from Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, KY. She earned her MA in English, with a concentration in Multicultural and Transnational Literature, from ECU, during which time she served on the NCLR staff as Editorial Assistant and then Assistant Editor. After graduating, she volunteered as Managing Editor while teaching at Pitt Community College. She is now also pursuing a master’s in History at UNC Wilmington. North Carolina native SARAH DESSEN is a #1 New York bestselling author of Young Adult novels. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her outstanding contribution to young adult literature. Since her first novel, That Summer (1997; reviewed in NCLR 1997), she has published two dozen more. She lives in Chapel Hill with her family. Read an interview with her in NCLR 2006.
ABOVE Sarah Dessen with
D.G. Martin on North Carolina Bookwatch, 22 Oct. 2019
One of the major recurring themes in young adult (YA) fiction is the search for identity. As teenagers, most of us probably questioned who we were and who we wanted to be. As we grew up, we discovered that our parents didn’t know everything, the world was a lot bigger than we thought, and life was not as simple as it seemed when we were children. As the characters in YA novels question who they are and discover that the answers are not as clear as the questions, young adult and adult readers alike may find themselves asking the same questions Sarah Dessen’s protagonists tend to ask themselves in her twentyfive YA novels: Who am I? Am I the person I thought I was? Who/What is important to me? Whom should I trust? Where should I go from here? In The Rest of the Story, Dessen’s newest novel, Emma Saylor Payne’s struggle with her identity is reflected in her name: her mother’s side always called her Saylor while her father and his family have always called her Emma. Similarly, the lake central to the novel’s setting is called
by two different names, Lake North and North Lake, depending on which side of the lake the residents live on. Although “[t]here had always been invisible lines between the two sides and the two communities” (355), this did not stop those living on the different sides from interacting. It was on the shores of this lake that Emma’s parents met and fell in love. Her father’s family enjoyed the wealth and luxury of Lake North, while her mother came from a hardworking family on North Lake. Emma has vague memories of time spent on the lake with her mother’s family and local friends, but since her mother’s death from an overdose of painkillers and alcohol, she has been far-removed from their lives until, with no other options available, Emma’s father arranges for her to stay with her maternal grandmother and family while he honeymoons with his new wife, Tracy. With this family on North Lake, Emma begins to discover who Saylor is. Emma’s father blames himself for his daughter’s high anxiety, which manifests itself in her