by Anne Parker

Created on: August 09, 2009   Last Updated: August 11, 2009

Lauren has it all: good grades, popularity, and great friends, and a boyfriend every girl wants, and yet she feels like she's missing something. It just takes the arrival of one guy for her to figure out the answer to what she's missing. Evan Kirkland.

Lauren's mother left her when she was 6, but no one saw it coming. Lauren went to school that unfortunate day and came home to find all her mother's stuff gone along with her,forever. Ever since then, no one in her house has talked about it, and her dad has endless girlfriends to make up for that fact. Then how does Evan tie in with all of this? Well, it goes back to Lauren's father's first girlfriend that moved in with Lauren and her dad, and they thought that they would all be a family again. Mary Kirkland and Evan Kirkland would be the new addition. But when Mary and Lauren's dad had these scary endless fights, Mary and Evan moved out the month before Evan's birthday. Lauren never figured out why, and hasn't seen them since. Now in high school, Evan is back.

His arrival brings confusion. Lauren suddenly doesn't know what she wants, all she knows is that she's been holding back and denying herself from what she really wants. That includes not being with Dave, her boyfriend. I mean, who would want to give up the perfect guy? Lauren can't force herself to tell her best friend Katie about how she feels, because she's afraid Katie will be mad at her for making the wrong choice.

As Dave keeps talking about their future together, Lauren keeps falling out of it. She knows it's simply not the future she wants because she cannot see herself in it. She finds out that she's attracted to Evan, and he feels the same way too, but she knows she can't explain what she's feeling to anyone else, because no one would understand. After all, Dave is amazingly perfect, and he loves her! Who wouldn't want that?

The whole situation brings Lauren and Katie apart, since Lauren begins confiding in Gail, a girl in her music class that she believes can actually understand what she's going through. As Lauren and Evan begin falling together, the more she gets attracted to him, and she knows that she's in love with Evan, not Dave. Suddenly, all the decisions are gone. Lauren knows what she wants, and she will have to fight against all the other choices to get it, and she will, because Evan is what she wants the most.

Bloom is a romantic novel with a twist, all about finding your true self and figuring out what you really want, and getting what you want even if it means fighting against all odds.

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