"I will let you down..."

This Lullaby
Sarah Dessen
379 pgs; pub 2002


If I did the maths with Dexter, on paper it was perfect. We’d come in well under the three-month mark, with me leaving for college just as the shine was wearing off. But the problem was that Dexter wasn’t cooperating. If my theories of relationships were plotted geographically, Dexter wasn’t even left of centre or far out in right field. He was on another map altogether, rapidly approaching the distant corner and headed into the unknown. (40)


Remy, eighteen and obsessively anal, is counting down the days until she leaves home for college. This is her last summer at home and she’s doing what she can to make it a clean split: she breaks up with Jerk Jonathan, she cleans and organises her room, and she finalises the details for her mother’s fifth marriage. She’s all set to go until Dexter comes crashing into her life.

Convinced that they are simply meant to be together, Dexter is determined to win the heart of Remy Starr. Unfortunately for him, he’s everything Remy KNEW she never wanted: gangly, messy and, worst of all, a musician. And she has “strict rules about musicians.”

Suddenly her no-strings summer is a lot more complicated and Remy has to face the truth that she may actually have real feelings for the boy, that it is actually possible to love.

Last year I read Sarah Dessen’s Lock and Key after having heard/read people rave about her, so when I saw This Lullaby at our local library I thought I’d give her another go. I would have to say that I preferred Lock and Key as an overall read, but that I really felt for Remy.

In the author’s note, Dessen wrote that of all her narrators, Remy is her favourite, and it’s understandable why. Remy is smart about everything except love – where she couldn’t be more wrong. She’s cynical before her time and this has affected how she lives her entire life. This Lullaby is, above all, a book about love – what it is, and what we want it to be. 3.5/5

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