Book Review: Alone Together by Sarah J. Donovan

Title: Alone Together

Author: Sarah J. Donovan

Genre: YA Realistic Fiction/Books in Verse

Number of Pages: 262

Rating: C

Recommended?: No

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I’m thinking about slowing down on YA ‘novels in verse’ for a while. I’m attracted to them because they’re really quick reads but most of them… well, aren’t all that good. Alone Together is about a teenage girl named Sadie from a large and dysfunctional Catholic family. She and her siblings are living in poverty and her mom’s a closeted lesbian, even though her parents kicked one of her sisters out of the house for being gay.

What follows is a pretty basic coming-of-age story with Sadie coming into her own and breaking away from her crazy brood. Sadie also has several cute guys pining over her and I didn’t know why boys liked her so much. I’m sick of unnecessary romance in YA books and this was as unnecessary it it gets. Sadie’s character wasn’t particularly well-developed and I never found myself connecting to her character. Her situation was understandably difficult but it never elicited any emotional reaction to me.

Aside from lots of family drama and two forgettable love interests, this is one of those stories where everything just kind of falls into place for the main character at the ending. It barely seemed like she had to work to find away out of her tough situation, she had a posse of helpful people to offer her aid and they show up at just the right moment. Overall, this book was just okay… I didn’t actively dislike it but there wasn’t anything that stood out about it either. It was well-intentioned but generic.