Saint Anything is a story about Sydney’s family that is rocked to its core when her brother, Peyton, makes a life-altering decision. Peyton’s poor and selfish decision affected Sydney to the point where it changed her life as she knew it. She was left to deal with her parents who seem to only be worried about Peyton in prison, starting at a new school and making new friends while trying to maintain her old friendships. High-school can be such a pain.
She ends up meeting the Chatham family and they take her in and for the first time, she finally feels like she isn’t invisible. With her new friends, she discovers what it means to belong and how to move forward when your old life falls apart. She goes through good and bad times with them, and the friendships never waver. They only become stronger.
This story touches on the hard subject of what it feels like to be a good person stuck living in the shadow of someone who made catastrophic decisions. In situations like that, it is easy to feel like everything is unfair and that you are paying for mistakes that you didn’t even make. This is such a hard issue to overcome. You grapple with knowing you are good, but still feeling like you are lacking something that would make people finally see you for who you are.
This book is a perfect example of what happens when someone else makes a decision that changes your entire life. On the journey with Sydney, you feel her pain when her parents blow her off to focus on Peyton. You feel the isolation and loneliness she feels when no one is around. But you also experience the joy when she becomes friends with Layla and you are cheering her on when Layla incorporates her into her family.
I adore this book because of the way the author, Sarah Dessen, writes her characters. To me, they are easy to relate to and you want what is best for them. I could see a part of myself in each of the characters. They all had well-developed personalities and they all contributed something significant to the story. Sometimes as readers we are only concerned with the fate of the main character, but in Saint Anything, I was fully invested in what happened with Layla, Mac, Eric and Irv. All of the characters in this book were easy to root for.
Saint Anything really drives home the fact that solid and loyal friends are vital to your well-being. Even though I believe that Sydney was a strong person who could handle difficult life situations, her friends played a huge role in supporting her and pushing her to be the person she always wanted to be.
One of my favorite quotes from Saint Anything that I believe sums up the entire book: “When faced with the scariest of things, all you want is to turn away, hide in your own invisible place. But you can’t. That’s why it’s not only important for us to be seen, but to have someone to look for us, as well’.
That one quote was huge for me. It actually made me stop reading and ponder it for quite awhile. We have all been in situations where we experience something that absolutely terrifies us and we don’t want to face it. Then someone comes along, holds out their hand, and pulls you out of your hiding place. People close to you can give you the strength to face anything.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a story about starting over, what it takes to make it happen and what it means to have solid and loyal friends to help every step of the way.