The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp is a book about a teenager named Sutter Keely meeting a girl named Aimee. The book follows their journey from when they met to when she leaves for college. At the beginning, Sutter is with a girl named Cassidy and he is an alcoholic. As the book progresses, Sutter and Cassidy break up and he meets Aimee when he wakes up passed out on her front lawn. Then, they start to date and he encourages her to come out of her shell and she encourages him to try to stop drinking. At the end, Aimee goes to college across the country with hopes of Sutter joining her later but instead he leaves her to be on her own.
In the beginning of the book, I thought that Sutter was the type of person to not care about his future or anyone else. When he met Aimee, it was pretty obvious that they were the opposites of each other and I thought that they will never work. Aimee was reserved, good at school and had little friends and Sutter is very social and doesn't think about the future or the past. I think a lot of the reasons why Sutter is this way is because his father left him when he was pretty young. In a flashback, it seemed that Sutter had a very close relationship with his father, when he left Sutter might of felt misunderstood because he hates the rest of his family. As the book went on Aimee influenced Sutter in many ways and Sutter influenced Aimee. As I was reading, I noticed that very slowly, Sutter changed a little bit. For example, he started to make an effort on being a better person. When the school year came to an end, they both agreed they wanted to go to college together and live together in St. Louis. When Aimee left for college, Sutter never followed her, he just left her alone without telling her. I think that he thought that he was holding her back from her dreams and her future but he probably didn't realize how much he meant to her. I think that showed that Sutter never really changed at all. After he built a really strong relationship with Aimee, he just abandoned her and he was fine with it. He is at a worse place than he was in the beginning of the book because there is no one he can go to. Overall, I think that this book shows that some people never change even when there are people that love them.