Whether you’ve been following her for years and collect her books, (like myself) or you’re in the mood for something, What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen should have a place on your bookshelf.

The book, which came out this past summer to amazing reactions, follows the story of McLean. She grew up in the world surrounded by the fan-demonuim of college basketball and culinary cuisine, spending all of her free time with her loving parents in their family restaurant. She thought everything was okay. “Thought”, being the key word here. When her mother has a turbulent affair and becomes pregnant, she throws away the world of normalcy, basketball, and “McLean.”

She begins to move around with her father who closes the restaurant and takes a traveling job with a company in charge of helping struggling restaurants succeed. Every time she moves to a new town and school, it is an opportunity to throw away her emotional baggage that accompanies her and try again. Using variations of her middle name Elizabeth, she becomes Eliza: the rah-rah cheerleader, who hung out with the popular jocks. New town, new name. She then becomes Lizbet: hanging out with the thespians and the drama mamas. “Beth” was the school-spirit/student-government/recycling club over-achiever. But when she lands in Lakeview (the fictional setting for many of Sarah Dessen’s books) to Dave, her next-door-neighbor, she is finally just McLean.

It’s hard enough being a teenager in high school, but McLean’s life is in emotional overdrive. She is constantly in a bickering-match with her mother about her betrayal and her parents are in a custody-battle stalemate. She is worried about her father’s job fixing up Luna Blu, the almost down-and-out Italian place. She is helping Luna Blu’s manager, Opal, with a community service project to construct a model-sized version of their town, which is a difficult feat.

But then there’s Dave. Insert sigh. The hunky and mysterious neighbor. He was the good kid, the classified genius who excelled in school because of his suffocating parents but just wants a chance to be a normal teenage boy, without the worry of college classes and Brain Camp. Their chemistry is magnetic and they find themselves getting wrapped up in a relationship before they realize it. This dependency for Dave scares her, especially when she isn’t sure who the “real” McLean is anymore.

I have loved Sarah Dessen’s books for years, but this one was truly one of my favorites. The way she combines family drama (which every teenage girl can relate to) and the emotional ups and downs of high school love and friendships, (again, relatable) makes for an interesting story that you can’t put down. One thing that I love is that if you are a Dessen-head follower, she ties all of her stories together and subtly “checks-ups” on all of her other characters, like Owen and Annabel from her book Just Listen, who are briefly mentioned. It allows you to know that the characters you became attached to while reading her other books are still going strong.

I definitely suggest this book, and anything else by this amazing writer.  Her writing is magnetic and spunky, the epitome of real-world life. This books is a definite must-read.