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Narrated by Rachel Botchan
Sarah DessenUnabridged — 12 hours, 48 minutes
Narrated by Rachel Botchan
Sarah DessenUnabridged — 12 hours, 48 minutes
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From the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Once and for All
Nights have always been Auden's time, her chance to escape everything that's going on around her.
Then she meets Eli, a fellow insomniac, and he becomes her nocturnal tour guide.
Now, with an endless supply of summer nights between them, almost anything can happen...
Want a change from fictional neckbiters and backbiters? Welcome Auden West, a studious good girl about to be sun-kissed…Confiding and dry-witted, Auden's voice is like listening to your best bud while splitting a carton of Haagen-Dazs. Author Sarah Dessen beautifully captures that sense of summer as a golden threshold between past regrets and future unknowns, a time that shimmers with the sweet promise of now.
—The Washington Post
…a wistful narrative of a young woman's last summer before heading off to college…the satisfying ending will give many readers a lump in their throat.
—The New York Times
Studious good girl Auden, named for the poet, makes a snap decision to spend her summer before college at her father's beach house rather than with her mother, a professor whose bad habits include male grad students. Auden's parents divorced three years earlier, a split she's not yet over. Her remarried father has already produced another heir, a colicky baby named Thisbe (after a tragic figure from Shakespeare), with his young wife, Heidi, who owns a boutique. Feeling sympathy for stressed-out Heidi, Auden agrees to do the shop's bookkeeping, providing her with an instant social circle-the teenage clerks plus the boys from the neighboring bike rental, including hunky, wounded Eli. Both night owls, Auden and Eli bond when he coaxes her to experience childhood activities-bowling, food fights, learning to ride a bike-that her insufferable parents never bothered to provide. Auden's thoughtful observations make for enjoyable reading-this is solid if not "top shelf" Dessen: another summer of transformation in which the heroine learns that growing up means "propelling yourself forward, into whatever lies ahead, one turn of the wheel at a time." Ages 12-up. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Dessen has built a well-deserved reputation...[her] many fans...expect nuanced, subtle writing, and they won't be disappointed.
Gr 8 Up
It's the summer before college and Auden goes to her father's house in the small coastal town of Colby for some well-earned R&R. Having no plans other than to preread textbooks for her first-semester classes at Defriese University, the would-be bookworm's solitude is quickly disrupted by Thisbe, her colicky new half sister. Strolling the boardwalk with a fussy baby and late night coffee runs at the Gas/Gro lead to chance encounters with the locals, whose main pastime revolves around Colby's bike park. Auden's curiosity is piqued by Eli, a bike-shop worker whose reserved, solitary nature seems to match her own. Her social sphere widens when Heidi, her sleep-deprived stepmom, asks for some bookkeeping help in her fashion boutique, and Auden is drawn into the circle of girls who work and hang out there, including Maggie, the clerk also bound for Defriese in September, and sidekicks Leah and Esther. Auden joins in on evening rituals of "store-going," eating junk food, and house parties while keeping her budding relationship with Eli to herself. Even Dessen's minor characters are multifaceted and interesting. Readers will be most absorbed by Auden and Eli's romantic friendship, the type soul mates are born of, played out in the bike shop, Colby's all-night Laundromat, and coffee shops. This summer vacation-themed story will be savored.-Vicki Reutter, Cazenovia High School, NY
Auden missed childhood thanks to her parents' divorce, which she navigated with the gravitas of a 30-year-old. No bike-riding, no giggly sleepovers. Just schoolwork, college ambitions and relentless insomnia. In the summer before college, she spontaneously joins her dad, his 20-something wife and new baby at their oceanfront house, hoping to transform into someone who enjoys normal teenage fun: beach, boardwalk, bonfires and beers. Dessen reworks well-traveled terrain and creates a remarkably original story with realistic teen dialogue, authentic girl friendships and a complex underlying question: Can people really change? Taut, witty first-person narration allows readers to both identify with Auden's insecurities and recognize her unfair, acerbic criticisms of people. It's Eli, a fellow insomniac, with whom she connects, and together they tick off items on her kid to-do list (food fights, bowling, paper-delivery route) while the rest of the town sleeps. The spark between these two sad teens and the joyful examples of girl connectivity deepen this ostensibly lighthearted, summer-fun story, which offers up complex issues-the residual effects of divorce, acceptance of imperfect parents and lip-gloss feminism. (Fiction. 14 & up)
"Beautifully captures that sense of summer as a golden threshold between past regrets and future unknowns." -The Washington Post
Rachel Botchan realizes every opportunity to capture the ironic, dramatic voice that has drawn fans to Sarah Dessen ever since her first book. This book's heroine, Auden, is a studious girl who's acted like an adult for most of her 17 years. She embraces the attitudes of her haughty academic mother, including a horror of her "extraneous, overblown, exuberant" stepmother. All that changes when Auden spends the summer between senior year and college in a beach town, living with her father, stepmother, and newborn stepsister. Auden makes friends with a clique of girls, a mysterious young man, and, most importantly, her real self. Botchan perfectly renders the teenage dialogue and emotionally charged situations upon which Dessen has built her reputation. S.W. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940171873820 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 06/16/2009 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,014,761 |
