Heart-y Reading: Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Readers who grab Sara Zarr's second novel, Sweethearts, lured by the pink-frosted, heart-shaped cookie on the cover and lusting for a formulaic piece of teen love fluff, won't be disappointed, but they won't get what they expect. Zarr, whose debut novel Story of a Girl was a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist, has given readers another character-driven study that explores the meaning of love in all its expressions.

Jenna Vaughn is her own creation. She is assembled, like a new facade on an old building, upon the substructure of Jennifer Harris, a fat, friendless class outcast, held together emotionally only by the candy she steals and consumes secretly, and the rock-solid loyalty of Cameron Quick, who is her only friend through fifth grade. Like Jennifer, whose single mother is distracted by her job and determination to earn a nursing degree, Cameron is on his own as the oldest child in a dysfunctional family, the victim of his father's possible sexual abuse and his mother's weak compliance. When Cameron disappears overnight in fifth grade, Jennifer's teacher tells her he moved, her classmates tell her he died in a gruesome accident, and her mother lets her believe he is gone forever. Lonely and grieving, Jennifer slowly begins to rebuild herself. When her mother remarries a kind and empathetic man who adopts her, Jennifer Harris becomes Jenna Vaughn, a slender and pretty high school student, a senior with popular friends Katy and Steph and a sweet, attentive boyfriend, Ethan. Although she role-plays Jenna convincingly most of the time, she is never quite at home in her own skin, always feeling a bit of an imposter, a pretender whose fraud must be carefully concealed from everyone, even her own family.

When Cameron suddenly reappears as a student at her small charter prep academy, Jenna's outer shell begins to crack. She is drawn to Cameron, whom she realizes she still loves in a childlike way, despite his strange reticence to tell her very much about the years lost to them. Gradually, in carefully placed flashbacks, the reader learns about the incident that caused Cameron's sudden removal from her life, a traumatic, abusive encounter for Jennifer and Cameron with his unstable father from which the two children escaped through a window. Gradually the persona she has assembled falls apart, and the person she was, the shunned "Fatifer" of childhood, begins to overwhelm her relationships with her parents, with Ethan, and with her friends. Cameron, too, is torn between the need to re-establish his bond with her and the drive to try to salvage his own family relationship back in California. When Cameron disappears again, Jenna finally tells her mother and stepfather the full story from her childhood and begins to find a way to integrate the two parts of herself with or without Cameron.

"This book is not a romance," Sara Zarr has said. "But even though it is not a love story, it is a story about love." Although there's no final resolution, no gauzy dissolve where Jenna and Cameron, reunited at last, melt into each other's arms in a cliched conclusion, Jenna does begin to recognize the deep significance of love, from Cameron, from her outwardly shallow but loyal friends, and from her supportive family which carries her forward, finally able to be present wholly and fully in her own life.

Casual romance readers may feel deprived of their happy ending here, but most young adult readers will appreciate Zarr's treatment of teen characters as real people, able to comprehend the complexities of life and love and learn from those experiences.