Sarah Dessen Is Back After 7 Years - and Her New YA Novel Just Hit No. 1
Seven years is a long time to wait for a summer read. But Sarah Dessen's readers have been patient, and the numbers suggest it was worth it.
Change of Plans, Dessen's fifteenth novel, hit shelves May 5 and immediately landed at number one on the New York Times YA bestseller list. It's also the latest selection for Good Morning America's Young Adult Book Club. For a writer whose books (Just Listen, The Truth About Forever, Along for the Ride) defined what YA contemporary fiction sounded like for an entire generation of readers, a return after seven years carries real weight.
The new book follows Finley, a teenager who has built her life around her magnetic boyfriend Colin and their carefully mapped-out future. When he breaks up with her on the first day of his cruise, via video call, everything she thought she knew falls apart. What follows is the kind of summer that tends to change people. An unexpected trip with her estranged mother to a family home about to be sold, a diner full of strangers who become something like family, and a boy named Ben who notices things about Finley that she hadn't noticed about herself.
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Dessen has described the book as a full-circle moment. Her daughter Sasha, who was in fifth grade when the last novel came out, is now on the verge of graduating high school, the same life milestone Finley is navigating. The fictional setting is North Lake, the same town from 2019's The Rest of the Story, a place loosely drawn from White Lake, North Carolina, where Dessen spent summers growing up.
During the gap between books Dessen went through a period of intense creative doubt and multiple false starts. She has talked about the years of trying to figure out what story she actually wanted to tell next, and the specific challenge of writing toward an audience whose lives keep changing while your book sits unfinished.
Kirkus Reviews gave Change of Plans a starred review, calling it a warm, nuanced coming-of-age story. Reviews from readers are more mixed, with some longtime fans finding the book familiar territory and others calling it exactly what they needed. But Dessen has never pretended to reinvent the wheel, and the readers who love her have never asked her to.
For any parent who handed their teenager a Dessen novel back in the 2000s (or who was that teenager) this one may hit close to home. It's a book about a girl figuring out who she is without someone else's plans to lean on.
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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 1:12 PM.