Check It Out Again: Worth Paying Attention To
A book that you should Just Read!
The book Just Listen by Sarah Dessen poses quite the challenge in the title. To “just listen” to a book with both a cover and summary that begs for readers to put it down and classify it as just another YA novel is hard, but definitely not a waste of time.
If there was any book to prove that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it would most definitely be this one. In just one night Annabel loses her best friend, her sanity, and her seemingly perfect life. Or rather, she notices that her “perfect life” was just about as perfect as her sister’s eating habits or the night her supposed best friend couldn’t be anything other than her worst enemy. The summary on the book jacket describes the plot of it as her fixing her problems and falling for Owen, who is an ice cold bucket of water ready to shock her out of her recent revelations, it read more as a book of her falling for herself, which is an important and rare find amongst other YA novels. Along with this idea, the book deals with other major problems like eating disorders, sexual harassment, and even unintentional abuse.
It starts with her family, which is consumed by her mother’s depression and her sister’s life-threatening eating disorder, that there is no room for her to disappoint anyone. So she stays quiet. As the story progresses it is slowly revealed what happened the night she and Sophie – her best friend – had a falling out, but the trauma that she experienced and the verbal abuse she took from Sophie afterwards was blocked out by the fact that no one bothers to listen. So she stays quiet. She would set herself on fire to keep others warm, and, for lack of a better word, she was a doormat. With the help of Owen, however, she didn’t just get people to listen, but she got to the amazing point in her life where she really didn’t care if they listened or not. She becomes the “strong female character” that is really popular in YA novels today, and overcomes all of her problems on her own.
Not everything in this book is perfect. Not everything in this book is profound. It doesn’t break away from any molds or make any earth-shattering developments. However, none of those statements take away from the fact that Just Listen is an important book, and should be read by anyone who would care to think, or to appreciate, or maybe to just listen.
