Review: What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen

I normally like Sarah Dessen's novels and this wasn't an exception. Overall I liked the plot, but it left  a little to be desired. I first got this book in order to get a ticket to meet Sarah Dessen and to get the book signed. She’s one of my favorite authors and here’s her signature:

 

The plot is about a girl named McClean who moves a lot with her father, and every time she moves she goes by a different name and changes her personality. It also talks about a boy whom she meets and other friends. The back of this book contains a small but accurate summary of the plot.

Personally, I don’t think this was her best  novel (that honor goes to This Lullaby). From a scale of one to ten (one meaning that I didn’t like this book at all and 10 meaning that I loved it), I would rate this a seven. I liked it but I expected more. One thing that I’ve noticed about Sarah Dessen is that the beginnings of her books are very boring. That wasn’t the case with this book. I liked many aspects about the plot such as the characters and the transformation McClean has gone through. I also liked that this book kept me interested, I wanted to keep reading for hours on end (luckily I read the majority of this book on multiple long flights, so I didn’t have mush stopping me from reading for hours).   What I didn’t like was that there wasn’t a very exciting point of the novel. Most of her novels have a very climatic and exciting part of her novels but I didn’t find it here. Overall, the positives outweighed the negatives so I would recommend this to most people. If you like books that are more action packed or fast paced, you’re not going to like this book. If you like slower, semi-dramatic, and dare I say “teenager-y” books you’ll probably like this. Heard of any new books lately? Let me know in the comments.