While reading Sarah Dessen’s This Lullaby, I felt like the teenagers were older than they were.  I liked the book, and Remy especially but she sounded more like someone in her twenties than late teens.  Even after the early college Psychology and Sociology classes given to us in high school, we were psychoanalyzing each other pretty often.  But high schoolers don’t often dwell on the way their behaviors are habits the way Remy does.

Teens are less hampered by trying to analyze long-standing behaviors or to treat something they did for two years as a long-standing behavior.  They’re still trying out new things and most don’t feel bogged down by the past in that way.  Remy’s reflectiveness felt a little beyond her years, particularly the way she is about sex, drinking and smoking.  She seems weary of it though only eighteen, and I haven’t really heard folks sound like that until they hit their quarter life crisis.  She reminds me more of people’s reactions to graduating college.  Graduating from high school, there are still so many open doors and opportunities waiting, but at the end of college, you’ve made your bed and have to lie in it.  Remy’s lack of seeing college as a new beginning was the primary reason I got that vibe.  It seemed like she had too much experience for the very narrow time frame she had been in her party girl phase.  Even if she was a serial dater for about a year, she still couldn’t have had enough boyfriends and relationships to really draw the conclusions she’s coming to.

There was too much “finality” with Remy’s descriptions to seem like she was still a teen.