Say The Word by Jeannine Garsee

Title: Say The Word
Author: Jeannine Garsee
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reading Level: Young Adult, 14+
Publication Date: March 17, 2009
Pages: 360
My Edition: ARC
Amazon Page

Rating: C
Plot - 16/20
Characters - 15/20
Writing - 14/20
Originality - 17/20
Entertainment - 7/10
Recommendation - 8/10
Total: 77/100

Summary:
The world expects perfection from seventeen-year-old Shawna Gallagher, and for the most part, that’s what they get. She dates the right boys, gets good grades, and follows her father’s every rule. But when her estranged lesbian mother dies, it’s more than perfect Shawna can take. Suddenly, anger from being abandoned ten years ago is resurfacing along with Shawna’s embarrassment over her mother’s other family. As she confronts family secrets and questions from the past, Shawna realizes there’s a difference between doing the perfect thing and doing the right thing. Shawna’s honest and relatable voice will draw readers in and hold them until the last page in this coming-of-age story. Jeannine Garsee has delivered a compulsively readable second novel, perfect for fans of Sarah Dessen and Laurie Halse Anderson.

Review:
I honestly was shocked by this novel. It surprised me. I really didn't expect of what this novel was.

The beginning was a little shaky. The middle seemed kind of odd. But the ending was actually pretty good, though sometimes weird. For a novel being compared to Sarah Dessen and Laurie Halse Anderson, you would think to have pretty high expectations, right? That's what I thought, so this novel was a pretty big disappointment for me.

The writing felt awkward and tacky. Garsee had this thing in the dialogue where she liked to make emphasis on words by putting a hyphen between them I didn't think Garsee really crafted her characters all that great. They were clumsy and had a odd feeling about them. Honestly, all of the characters just blended together and in the end I couldn't tell them apart. And then with that hyphen thing I said above, she used it for the dialogue and all the characters talked like that. It was really distracting.

I thought the whole plot was a bit of a mess. It seemed like it was all jumbled together. One thing would happen with her mother, then something at school would happen, and oh, look! Her dad got a new girlfriend! It was just too much at once, all whipped together.

So, really. I thought this novel was a distraction, and a mess. I feel it could of been a lot better with a bit more plotting to it.