Author: Sarah Dessen
Published by: Penguin
First off, I’ve been a Sarah Dessen reader for over a decade, and her books have always held a special place in my heart. After receiving devastating personal news and watching the movie adaptation of Along for the Ride, I decided to re-read all of her novels in search of the comfort they once gave me. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was that, at 24, I’d find a lot of problematic ideas that went over my head at the age of 13.
After finishing Keeping the Moon and finding it almost as comforting as I did as a teen (apart from the raging fatphobia that was in every piece of entertainment in the 2000s), I had somewhat high hopes for this book. I was thoroughly let down. Scarlet and Halley’s bond is the high point of the book and honestly, it would’ve been a much better novel if it had focused only on the dynamics between the two of them. The mother-daughter relationship between Halley and her mom is also a high point, I found their struggles to be very relatable and, again, wished that the book had focused a little more on them.
Now, onto the (many) bad things. Not only does it also have fatphobia sprinkled all over, but it’s also just short of a morality play. Dessen’s message is loud and clear: teens should never have sex, because when they do bad things happen. This theme is present in all of her novels (At least from what I remember), her protagonists are always virgins and any girl that is known to have sex regularly (or even to have done it more than once) is very clearly branded a slut and depicted as a nasty person.
The protagonist is reprimanded by her best friend several times whenever she expresses that she might want to sleep with her boyfriend. Granted, the MC’s boyfriend is an awful human and she really shouldn’t have sex with someone like him but not because her virginity is this “special” thing that she will “never be able to get back.”
SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON
Scarlet warns her friend about having sex with Macon because she slept with her own boyfriend that summer and regretted it afterward. Dessen punished Scarlet for this by making her get pregnant and have her boyfriend die the day after they'd had sex. Not only that, but she also makes sure to communicate to her teen readers that not even protection is enough to keep them safe when it comes to sex. After all, Scarlet’s boyfriend wore a condom but seeing as they were so “inexperienced,” it slipped off during the act, and apparently Scarlet had never heard of the morning-after pill. Once she finds out she’s pregnant and tells her mother, Scarlet is livid with the fact that her mom is deadset on her aborting the baby. She is angered by how blasé her mother is about the act of abortion in general, seeing as she herself had gotten pregnant with Scarlet as a teenager. Scarlet goes as far as saying that the only unselfish thing her mother has ever done was to not have aborted her. If that doesn’t make Dessen’s opinion on the matter clear enough, Scarlet’s mom is the only character we know who has had an abortion (when her daughter was around five) and she is depicted as a selfish and irresponsible person.
It’s clear to me that Dessen wanted to Send A Message to young readers with this book. Never have sex because even if you do it only once and use protection you will get pregnant and your boyfriend will abandon you (the death part is optional). Not only that but once you get pregnant, getting an abortion shouldn’t even be considered because that would be Bad and Selfish.
I sincerely hope no teen ever reads this book again.
For Trigger Warnings click here
Originally written in 2022
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