Tamara Ireland Stone’s young adult novel Every Last Word is from the point of view of
Samantha, a junior in high school struggling to keep up with all her popular friends. Throughout all of Stone’s books, she stays to one common theme, all the main female characters save themselves in the end. Compared to other young adult authors, Stone doesn’t focus on love, conflicts, and teenage problems as much as other books in the genre do. She focuses on the aspect of her main character’s, Samantha, mental health, and she develops her disease very accurately which isn’t really approached in many books in the young adult genre. Every Last
Word focuses on Samantha's struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and how she balances her disorder, her social
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She’s outgoing, confident, and happy. When Stone introduces Samantha's social
‘school’ personality the contrast is extreme. Samantha in social situations is almost a wallflower compared to her popular friends she hangs out with; she’s shy, closed off, and anxious all the time. Stone develops Sammantha’s conscience extremely detailed, the reader can really see and understand the struggle between Samantha and her conscience. How she fights it and how she gives into it. It really touches the audience in a way no other young adult book really does.
To Samantha, her life is hard as a teenager. Living with OCD, anxiety attacks, and social drama. It isn’t exactly normal. Being popular is really the only thing that matters to her, she doesn’t really know what else is ahead, besides college and her wanting a swimming scholarship outside of the state. When one of Sammantha’s best friends invites everyone but her and another girl in their friend group to a party it breaks her heart and really takes a toll on her relationship in
her friend group, but it then all seems like nothing when the climax of the book hits and
Samantha's world is turned