Change of Plans by Sarah Dessen

Finley has just finished high school when her world (at least, her small piece of it) falls apart. One minute she is planning to go to college with her boyfriend, Colin, after a fun trip to Manhattan with her mother, Catherine. Then, instead of New York, Catherine unexpectedly brings her daughter to clear out the family’s beach house, the Woods, vacant since her parents died. Catherine’s sisters, Kasey and Liz, are irritated that for years she hasn’t been around to help, but they welcome Finley, whom they’ve only met twice.

Worst of all, out of the blue, Colin breaks up with Finley by phone and she falls apart. It takes her most of the book to realize it wasn’t simply Colin she liked, it was being part of a crowd of outgoing teens. In the meantime, she makes herself useful at Kasey’s café, The Egg, and finds better friends there than the ones she had in high school, including quirky Ben. Of course, just as she has recovered from heartbreak to fall for Ben, Colin reappears. In the midst of all this, Finley tries to understand her mother’s reasons for being estranged from the family Finley has come to love.

There has been a seven year gap since Dessen's last book, The Rest of the Story. In an interview with USA Today, Sarah discusses some of the changes in YA literature in recent years and her fear that the genre had moved on without her. While it is true that fantasy is very popular now, there are still many books like this one where the main character is falling in and out of love and (one hopes) maturing in the process. I enjoyed Change of Plans but did not find it very different from earlier books. Sarah loves to include diner-type settings in her novels and certainly one sees people at their best and worst waiting tables and cooking. There is also the possibility of romance - I know several people who met their spouses while working at restaurants.

Cell phones became mainstream for high schoolers in the mid-2000s (about 45% of teens owned one by 2004) so there is nothing new about Finley’s obsessive checking of her phone. What did surprise me was that she threw it in a lake in a fit of angst. I don’t know any teen who would do that on purpose (although two of my nephews dropped theirs accidentally in a river), no matter how miserable they were. Finley is an odd mixture of proactive and passive: she chose to transfer to public school to have a different academic and social experience but then submerged her personality in someone else. She showed no curiosity about her mother’s family but once she meets them, she decides to stay, even when her mother leaves, and actually starts working a hard job. By the end of the book, she has learned to assert herself, thank goodness. I wouldn’t say she was Sarah’s most dynamic heroine but she was surrounded by an appealing group of secondary characters. I especially liked Lana, a waitress at the Egg, a who helps herself to a bed at the Woods because her mother is a drunk.  The book immediately hit #1 on the New York Times YA bestseller list.

My sisters and I have been reading Sarah’s books for nearly 30 years, and I took my nieces to meet her at a local signing in 2013. She’s always seemed like the kind of person we would have been friends with, had we gone to the same college (although she’s a Tarheel). Oddly enough, a few years later, I found out our fathers had been college classmates, although Professor Dessen (who passed away in 2025) was a Shakespearean scholar so he would have had more in common with my mother, two years behind him, than my father, who concentrated in Government.

Title: Change of Plans
Author: Sarah Dessen
Publication: Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 2026
Genre: YA
Source: Library