"What Happened to Goodbye" by Sarah Dessen

Did I buy this for $1 from my library's used book sale shelves on a whim?  I did.  Did I savor it for more than a week and wish it could have been longer?  I did.

McLean has been living with her dad ever since her parents' messy divorce a couple years ago.  Her mom has a new husband and twin toddlers to deal with, and McLean wants nothing to do with that.  Instead, she moves with her dad from town to town whenever his job as a restaurant rescuer requires him to move on.  Usually, when she arrives in a new town and starts at a new school, she gives herself a new nickname and creates a new persona to go with it.  Will she be a cheerleader?  A joiner?  Super studious?  She never knows until she arrives and picks a new nickname.

But, when McLean and her dad move to this latest town, where he'll be rehabilitating a local restaurant once again... McLean tells people her real first name.  And tries to remember who she actually is.  She gradually makes some real friends for the first time in years.  And she slowly begins rebuilding her relationship with her mom, sometimes against her will.

I really love how Dessen writes clean books about realistic teens.  Nobody is sleeping around, nobody is doing drugs, nobody is behaving in radically inappropriate ways.  They're just teens grappling with school, friends, relationships, growing up, making decisions, living with consequences... and I love the dickens outta that.  Granted, I have only read one other book of Dessen's before this, Saint Anything, but it was similarly age-appropriate in content, behavior of characters, everything.  I was kind of afraid Saint Anything was some kind of anomaly, but What Happened to Goodbye was similarly clean and refreshing, and so now I am just going to have to read more of Dessen's books.

Particularly Good Bits:

Amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly where you needed to be (p. 279).

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map.  It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together.  Not a place but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a sold shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go (p. 364-365).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for some occasional cussing, mentions of underage drinking (treated as troubling), and plot points that revolve around marital infidelity (never described; shown as damaging).  There is a scene where two adults were obviously making out until a teen walked in the room, and there are a couple of very sweet, brief kisses between teens.

This is my 16th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfChallenge2023.