Originally published at Breakpoint.org, August 29, 2011

In order to review Sarah Dessen’s latest Young Adult romantic adventure, I had to get hold of the copy that my young adult daughters were passing around among themselves. It was going to take a while to get to my turn, so while waiting, I decided to do some background research. I had read one book by Dessen (Along for the Ride) quite a while ago, and thought I’d read a couple more. At the library, I picked up Lock and Key and This Lullaby.

As I read my preliminary research books, and then again when I finally got my hands on What Happened to Goodbye, I felt a strong sense of deja  vu. Dessen changes the names, but her female protagonists have a lot in common. All of those I read about were older teen girls — sixteen or seventeen — in their last years of high school, considering going off to college, and dealing with difficult or dysfunctional mothers and sometimes absent fathers. Each of our heroines is to some extent emotionally closed and guarded, and afraid to love and be loved. Enter the cute, vulnerable, and longsuffering guy who breaks through her shell of self-protection and helps her to risk engaging in a meaningful relationship.

Mclean, the main character in What Happened to Goodbye, is angry with her mother because of the messy divorce that Mclean blames on her mother’s decision to go off with another man. The divorce and subsequent frequent moves with her father, who has a job that involves lots of travel, have given Mclean an identity crisis. Unsure of who she is, or what was real and what was fake about her pre-divorce family of origin, Mclean has been reinventing herself in every town where she and her father move.

But when they come to Lakeview, the fictional setting for all of the books that I read by Dessen, Mclean meets a boy, Dave, who will become an anchor for her free-floating identity, and she makes friends who want to know her as she really is.

So it’s chick lit for the high school set, and my girls devour it. I think Dessen’s books are so popular because they speak to issues and questions that teen girls, in particular, do grapple with and think about: Who am I really? Can I become a new person in a new setting, or am I doomed to make the same mistakes over and over? Is it better to have loved and lost? Is it worth the risk to commit oneself to a romantic relationship in this age of transience and uncertainty? Oh, and how do I deal with the newly realized fact that my parents, mom especially, are imperfect and maybe even seriously messed up?

I like the way Dessen’s books tackle these and other teen questions, with characters who don’t have it all together but who are trying. I don’t like the common assumptions that are perpetuated in the books: that all teens rebel and that all adult dating relationships and most teen ones eventually are consummated in a sexual relationship. There’s nothing explicit about teen sex in What Happened to Goodbye, but the assumption is there. It’s more overt in This Lullaby. In the latter book, promiscuity is rightly shown to be a poor defense mechanism for protecting oneself from true intimacy, but the assumption is still that if you love someone, you will eventually have sex as soon as you both get over all of your issues and hangups. Marriage, of course, is not even a blip on the horizon because, while these teens consider themselves old enough to have sex, they have college to attend, new places to explore, and lives to live before they even think of marriage.

I wish I could recommend some books similar to these but with a more Christian underlying worldview, and also with characters that were as engaging and real as Dessen’s. However, the “Christian” teen romances I’ve read are not nearly in the same league with these books as far as depth of characters and engagement with the real world. I don’t want the characters in Dessen’s books to all behave like sinless saints, a category of people I don’t believe exists this side of heaven, but I do wish there were someone in the novels who could exemplify or articulate a faith-based, or at least traditional, view of male/female and parent/child relationships, and even explore the vicissitudes of love and marriage and growing up from that perspective. Maybe I’m asking too much from a book that purports to be nothing more nor less than the latest in a series of highly acclaimed teen romance novels.

Content warnings: some mildly offensive language and discussion of premarital sexual situations, but no explicit sex or violence.