Book Review: When It Happens

When It Happens by Susane Colasanti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Warning: This review may contain hints of spoilers

Half-Way Point Impressions:
Sara is a romantic who has her own idea of the perfect guy and desperately wants that guy to be Dave. Dave is a popular kid who is dating Sara but might be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Dave might also be huge poser, pretending to be a certain way to fit into the cool crowd even if that way is not at all who he is. Tobey really likes Sara and is trying to figure out how he could get Sara to like her. Tobey also knows what a jerk Dave is and why he really wanted to be with Sara.
Sara has a troubled home life, in the sense that her dad isn't really in the picture and her mom doesn't really care much about her. Sara's mom seems to be someone who is dating someone different every other week and Sara is tired of. At one point in the book Sara even says that she wants someone to want to be with her (or something along those lines). Sara is also one of the smart kids.
Tobey is in band and is also smart but a huge slacker. He really wants his future to be about music and nothing else. He really likes Sara and hates that she likes Dave because he knows more about what kind of person Dave is that Sara does. Tobey recognizes that he could easily tell Sara the truth about Dave to get on her good side but he doesn't do this because he wants Sara to like him for who he is and not just because he's better than Dave.
As Sara dates Dave she seems to like him less and less and once she finds out that Tobey likes her, she finds herself becoming more attracted to Tobey, a guy she barely knows, than Dave, the guy she's dating.
I'm interested to see where this story is going to go from here.

Finished:
You know what I liked best about this book? The fact that even though there was a main story line (the relationship between Sara and Tobey) there were other things going on in the lives of the characters that didn't necessarily serve a direct purpose to the main story. What I mean to say is that there were other things going on in Sara and Tobey's lives that didn't have much to do with their relationship. This made them seem very real. For example, Tobey's conversations with his dad about college, or Sara's relationship with her mom who was there yet not there. Sara's issues with her mother didn't necessarily reach an epic climax where all was good and now they have the perfect mother-daughter relationship. There might have been a slight, miniscule improvement but definitely not the happily ever after kind. I like these kind of things in a story. I thought the book was about Sara and Tobey's romance but now I'm thinking its more about Sara, Tobey and their friends in their senior year of high school.

View all my reviews