Sarah Dessen

As a female who went to American public schoold my entire life, it's almost s rite of passage to read AT LEAST one Sarah Dessen book. I have read...

(counting in my head...

googling a list of her books...)

SEVEN of her books.

And all of them had the SAME GENERAL PLOT LINE.

In my senior AP English Lit class, I was ranting about her and even made a physical outline of her "formula" for writing:

1. Girl exists

•1a. Girl is flawed

••1a i: pretty but has sucky social life

••1a ii: pretty but has sucky home life

••1a iii: is NOT pretty

•1b. Girl is smart but also has flaw (see 1a i-iii)

2. Boy exists

•2a. Boy is cute but has flaw (see 1a i-iii and footnote)

3. Boy and girl meet but issues arise and they can't be together

4. Issue is solved

•4a. They end up together anyway

•4b. They end up splitting up*

*this only happened in one book because the boy happened to have the flaw of VIOLENTLY ABUSING GIRL

So that's pretty much every book she wrote in a nutshell, give or take a few names. Oh, and if you ever read/saw the movie Speak (Kristen Stewart, was about a girl who gets raped at a party), Dessen borderline plaigarized the plotline in her book Just Listen.

Overall, she's the most predictable sappy-writing-teenage-crap kind of novel writer that makes real writers (like everyone reading this) want to shoot themselves in the face over the fact that SHE'S SUCCESSFUL AND PEOPLE PAY HER TO WRITE THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Kills me.