Like Sarah Dessen's previous three novels, This Lullaby (Viking, $16, ages 12 and up) speaks directly and strongly to teenage girls. Dessen's greatest gift is knowing her audience: she pleases female adolescents with her creation of a savvy, but somewhat troubled main character who is surrounded by enough others like her to generate spicy dialogue and trendy humor. All of them operate in settings which resonate because of teen-familiar situations and well-chosen details. That's probably why the Chapel Hill author's first three novels are on the American Library Association's Best Books list. Dessen should enjoy similar success with This Lullaby because it is perfectly fits the same genre mold.
Once again, Dessen has created a bright, attractive heroine with an edge. Remy's life is filled with problems and anxieties teens can relate to, many of these caused by her fear of being hurt. Remy's decided that the best solution is to never let love in. As the book opens, Remy has just graduated high school. Before she enters Stanford in the fall she wants to have a summer fling. First she has to dump her boyfriend, who is "just not a keeper". Her girlfriends are used to Remy's love 'em and leave 'em style. They tease her about what to wear when dumping boyfriends : "black for mourning", something "cheerful and colorful ... to distract them" or "camouflage to help you disappear quickly in case they don't take it well". The clever banter of her friends is as comforting to Remy as sucking on an xtra Large Zip Coke laced with liquor, or working at Joie Salon where she's used to calming hysterical customers with botched haircuts.
Remy doesn't like love snags. And she's facing a lot of them. At the story's opening, sheâs planning her overly-dramatic writer-mother's fifth marriage with apparent ease, at the same time suspicious about its success. Remy's fears are justified. A short while after the marriage, husband number five leaves her mother with a houseful of empty Ensure cans and a slew of broken promises.
Remy's life is all about relationship troubles! Her quirky older brother, who has a penchant for hatching lizards in his bedroom, is falling for a pedestrian Tupperware-addicted girlfriend whose primary concern seems to be appearance. Remy's nervous about how her mother will survive after she leaves for college. After so many husbands have come and gone, their mother-daughter relationship is the one "with the expiration date". She's also still getting her balance from a recent past of drugs, drunkenness and careless, casual sex (situations which will also hook teenage readers). Each of these situations finds Remy questioning the permanence of love.
Remy's interior monologues and girlfriend chatter are full of glib mentions about her obsessive neatness and anal qualities, but these are all obvious cover-ups for her visceral fears about intimacy. The image that conveys this most poignantly is Remy's connection with "This Lullaby", the song her father wrote for her when she was a baby. "Even in death", she tells readers at the story's beginning, "my father was a one hit wonder. Or two, I guess, if you count me." "This Lullaby" was such a giant hit that she's hears it everywhere for years and recoils each time. At least publicly. Remy keeps her love for this song and desire for a father she never knew in the closet. Literally.
When she's distressed, she curls up in her closet with a blanket, pops "This Lullaby" into her CD player and falls asleep hearing her father's voice.
Remy is certainly not looking for long-lasting love when she meets Dexter. In what she comes to know as his typical clumsy manner, he knocks her into a wall and then tells her they're "meant to be together" . Neither Remy's sarcasm, outright rejection, or cursing can stop him from writing his phone number on her hand. Dexter, a young musician, is quirky, interesting and interested in a real relationship. Heâs everything Remy hates in a guy; he's gangly and so untied and stained that he seems "all loose ends, and I hate loose ends."
But he's as interesting to Remy as he will be to readers. His schtick is challenges which he issues in a "deep and game show host-like" voice. He urges a roommate to eat ten bananas for ten dollars, then raises the stakes to twenty dollars and cleaning the bathroom. Dexter prides himself on the fact that he once ate 32 ounces of Miracle Whip in 20 minutes flat. He invents challenges like "Five Bucks Says I Can Make Something Edible Out of The Canned Corn, French Fried Potato Sticks and Mustard in the Pantry".
Dexter is not all play, he also has "signature moves" that make Remy feel "almost like he was touching my heart". He's persistent and he listens, understands, and cares so much that Remy can no longer keep her "heart clenched tight, away from where anyone could get it." Dexter may have met his greatest challenge in Remy and he confronts her with her inability to let love in.
Dexter, as a character, points to Dessen's greatest challenge. It's Dexter that teases readers into believing that she has more talent than she's showing. In Dexter, Dessen's creativity, sense of humor, and playfulness meet with ease. Dexter threatens to take over this book because he's unique and colorful in a landscape of dull teenage backdrop, pedestrian banter made clever, and strained pedantic narcissistic self-reflection. The kind of writing that hooks teenagers, but denies the literary potential Dessen has. Just as Dexter breaks Remy's boyfriend mold, he destroys Dessen's tendency to stereotype. Like Remy, Dessen seems to hold herself back from taking risks that would give better results. This is another book that will please her devoted audience, but it could be so much more.
Short Take: Young fantasy fans delighted in the dragon and girl they met in Chapel Hill author, Luli Gray's award-winning Falcon's Egg (Bantam, $4.50). Both make a return appearance in Falcon and the Charles Street Witch (Houghton Mifflin, $15.00; ages 8-11). Dragons, magic, adventure, time travel, humor and intelligent writing fill the pages of this short novel.