Relook in a Book #3: Keeping the Moon aka Last Chance by Sarah Dessen

Goodreads Synopsis: Colie expects the worst when she's sent to spend the summer with her eccentric aunt Mira while her mother, queen of the television infomercial, tours Europe. Always an outcast -- first for being fat and then for being "easy" -- Colie has no friends at home and doesn't expect to find any in Colby, North Carolina. But then she lands a job at the Last Chance Cafe and meets fellow waitresses Morgan and Isabel, best friends with a loving yet volatile relationship. Wacky yet wise, Morgan and Isabel help Colie see herself in a new way and realize the potential that has been there all along.

Clearly, I’m on a Sarah Dessen kick. It seems once I started, I couldn’t stop. I just finished reading her third book, Keeping the Moon. This one is about a fifteen-year-old girl, Colie, who visits her aunt, Mira, in a beach town for the summer as her mom, the newest and most popular workout guru, tours Europe for her Kiki Sparks fitness line. Colie is friendless and dealing with low self-esteem due to having been made fun of when she was younger for being overweight. Now that she’s fit, with her mom’s help Colie still feels insecure about herself because of all the teasing she gets from mean girls back home and an untrue rumor about her. She ends up spending her summer with, I’m assuming, two twenty-one-year-olds as they are drinking and say she’s underage, meaning they aren’t, and an eighteen-year-old artist as they all live on her aunt’s property and work together at Last Chance, a diner in town and where Colie becomes a waitress as well. 

With this one, like That Summer, it felt like nothing was happening for a really long time. Again, I would have enjoyed reading a story about any of the side characters as they seemed to be having more going on with them and a lot of the story is Colie watching or listening to her co-worker, later on friends. The “romance” with Colie and Norman was really not included until towards the end of the book, similar to how Haven had her freak out on the last forty pages. I wish there was more about that. I wish there were more moments with them together other than the very flat ‘we’ve spent a lot of time working together at the diner.’

All the flashbacks to when she was younger and had a bad experience mainly felt shoehorned into the story and a little from out of nowhere in a few parts. For example, they were going to dance in the living room, spending the rest of the chapter remembering a school dance where she was made fun of before starting the next chapter, kind of where they left off before she started remembering the bad experience. The lead into it was a little abrupt for my liking.

I’d give this one 3.5 stars. It honestly took me a while to get into it. I would recommend this to fans of Sarah Dessen, but it wouldn’t be one that I bring up to a friend.