Just Listen

Title: Just Listen

Author: Sarah Dessen

Pages: 537

I am reading the book, Just Listen it is set in modern day America, I am not very sure where. The girl’s name is Annabel she is known as the perfect girl, she has model looks, she has confidence, a great social life but right now is the girl anyone would least want to be. Her ‘best friend’ Sophie is spreading rumors about her. I am not sure why but something has happened in the past that I don’t know about yet that has made her best friend Sophie and the whole school hate her. ‘Somehow I started to move forward again. Don’t look back, don’t do anything, I kept telling myself, but my throat felt raw, my head light’ (Dessen 86).

Her family is slowly falling apart as both her sisters have moved to New York for modeling, but when they come back her oldest sister Whitney is looking very thin. As Kristen the second oldest tries to tell the family that Whitney is not eating and is constantly exercising. That night when the girls came home, during the middle of the night when Annabel went to the bathroom she found her sister passed out with blood all over the floor. She was taken to the hospital and was okay but they then had to send her to a mental institution.

So Annabel goes to school, alone, with no one to talk to, just when she thinks her day might be getting better Sophie will come by and will call her something or swear at her. At lunch instead of sitting with all her ‘friends’ she sits alone on a table with a boy, he does not talk he just sits there listening to music tapping his foot on the floor. She wonders if he has ever talked to anyone, but everyday she will look at him eating her lunch just wondering what he might be thinking and what he is listening to.

I really wonder what is going to happen next, I have a feeling soon she is going to talk to the boy or he might talk to her. But what I really want to know, what did Annabel do to make her ‘best friend’ Sophie and the whole school hate her? I am really enjoying this book, I really like books written by Sarah Dessen, I have already read one of her books, That Summer and I really enjoyed it. I recommend this book to teenage girls because they can maybe relate to the characters and the characters feelings. So read, Just Listen by Sarah Dessen.