Auden, an overachieving student with everything about her future, decides to make a change over the summer before she starts college. She has grown up living with her mother, who is an English professor who places great importance on high goals and good schooling, but it is now time for her to go stay with her dad.

Her dad is an author who made it big 10 years earlier with his first novel and has been struggling to write a second since. Now, he has married Heidi, a successful business woman with a boutique in a seaside community. They have recently had a little girl named Thisbe ... yeah, her father insists on his girls having literary names so they stand out. Thisbe is quite the finicky infant, and Heidi can use all the help she can get. Unfortunately, Auden's dad seems more focused on his book.

Auden, who is comfortable with bookkeeping decides to take on a summer job at the boutique to help Heidi out. At first, she finds herself feeling out of the loop since the shop's employees are all girls her own age who seem able to only talk about clothes, boys, and having fun. None of which does Auden have a lot of experience with.

With that said, it seems like her new environment gives her an opportunity for new experiences, particularly after meeting Eli, a local biking phenom who seemed to go into seclusion after a car accident that he blames himself for took his friends life. As they start to hang out, Eli introduces Auden to all sorts of experience everyone has when they are growing up from food fights to bowling.

At home, she is starting to see that Heidi and her dad are falling into the same types of patterns that broke up her parent's marriage, and she finds it disturbing. With the help of her experiences with Eli and the girls at work, she realizes that life is not always about planning for the future, but in living or the now. Life throws all sort of curveballs at you, and only you can make the decisions about how you want to live your life.

Dessen is one of the modern classic writers of young adult literature. Teen girls generally eat up her books, and that is mostly because she has an innate ability to write realistic characters who are confronted with all sorts of problems. Sometimes they are serious as with Dreamland, and sometimes they are more everyday such as Auden's troubles with her parents divorce and her need to strive for academic success.

What is great is that her characters find an ability to grow and develop into a solution they can live with. Then again, isn't that what being a teenager is about. As Auden learns, though, sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride.