I'm no stranger to Sarah Dessen novels. Back in my much younger teen years, I devoured Sarah's first seven novels, chronically checking them out from my local library every summer. The release of Saint Anything had me nostalgic for Sarah's quietly profound contemporaries, and within one week I aquired three of her novels, fully intending to make my way through as many as possible this summer.
It's probably been 8+ years since I had read Just Listen, long before I started blogging, and my main memories of the book were that 1) I adored it and 2) The glass house. Upon my reread, I was thrilled to discover it held the same magic it did when I was younger and I enjoyed it even more a second time around (I bumped it from my original 4 star rating to a 5 star rating).
Just Listen focuses on Annabel, a junior in high school and local model who can be summed up in one word: nice. The book begins at the beginning of the school year after a falling out the previous spring with practically all of her friends, and the book follows Annabel as the silence of her social isolation starts to unravel the truth about what happened. She meets Owen, a loner more by choice than by consequence, and his obsession with listening, whether it be to music or the truth, forces Annabel to not only fill her life with sound again, but confront those unbearable moments of silence with her own truth that she's buried. Paralleled with Annabel's journey is that of her sister Whitney, home trying to recover from a severe eating disorder. Sarah weaves both sisters' tragedies and triumphs into a seamless narrative.
I feel like reading it in my twenties made it resonate even more with me, as I have more life experience under my belt and could find different aspects of each of the three sisters I could relate too. I read with older and more aware eyes the toxic friendships that Annabel had formed, and her quiet strength in finally acknowledging her role in them. I watched as "kindness" (the term most used by others to describe Annabel) both endeared and endangered Annabel throughout the novel. I applauded Owen's uncomfortable, but effective honesty. Perhaps what I valued most in this novel, rereading it post-college rather than in the middle of the hot mess that is high school for most, is those quiet moments of reflection that Sarah is so good at, that evoke feelings so profound precisely because they resonate on such a quiet, personal level. Whether it was Annabel looking into the eyes of a former friend and having the strength to admit to herself what happened, or Whitney telling a simple story in a coffee shop, the moments that pack the most emotional punch are some of the quietest in the plot, which made me feel the revelations on a more personal level, as if the characters were revealing these moments to me and me only.
“There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying.”
Sarah also gives peripheral peaks into the lives of secondary characters that leave me craving to know more. More about Sophie's anger, Clarke's confidence, Whitney's body image. Annabel is the connecting thread between all of the secondary characters, but each of them tugs at the reader with their own stories that fall behind Annabel's plot but feel as though they truly exist-and matter- despite never being fully fleshed out in the pages of Sarah's book. In true Sarah Dessen fashion, she makes me as enamored (maybe even more so) with her supporting cast as she does with her protagonist.
Overall: Just Listen is, appropriately, a quiet book. It deals with so many issues (eating disorders, anger management, assault, modeling, body image, bullying, etc) without using them as a crutch to carry along the plot; rather they function quietly to build a story that is profound without screaming about its importance. It's well balanced in handling as many issues as it tackles, and weaves together several deeper stories that all coincide with Annabel as the catalyst. Despite it being a back list release (it's almost ten years old) it never feels dated, and is timeless in the issues it addresses and the stories it seeks to tell. Just Listen is at the top of my list of YA contemporaries that I would recommend to anyone, because the themes are so varied and yet so universal at the same time: Sometimes the hardest, and most important, person to stop and really listen to is yourself.
Follow Me: Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads | Bloglovin'