Book Review: Falling in Love Again (Sweet Dreams, #23) by Barbara Conklin
I immediately began searching for Falling In Love Again (Sweet Dreams, #23) by Barbara Conklin on Barnes & Noble and Amazon, my usual go-to sites for used books. Both sites listed the book as temporarily out of stock, which was the second time I’d run into that issue while hunting for a used title. At that point, I was starting to panic because I really wanted to find out what happened next.
Then I remembered I’d previously ordered a few used books from ThriftBooks. I searched their site but couldn’t find the book at first. After adjusting my search terms, I finally located three available copies. Unfortunately, all of them were listed in only acceptable condition, which was disappointing because I’m pretty picky about used books and prefer them to be in good or like-new condition.
A few days later, I checked my mailbox and discovered the books I ordered had arrived, including Falling in Love Again. What made it even better was that I had completely forgotten I’d ordered them, so it felt like an unexpected surprise. My copy of Falling In Love Again turned out to be a book fair edition, which made me curious about how it differs from the standard edition. Thankfully, it was still in decent condition, with only a couple of small tears at the tops of a few folded pages.
Falling In Love Again (Sweet Dreams, # 23) picks up a year after P.S. I Love You (Sweet Dreams, # 1) ends with Mariah and her best friend Amy in their senior year in high school. Mariah had stepped down as editor of the school newspaper after receiving the news of Paul Strobe's death. She isn't dating anyone and is still pining away over Paul. Amy decides Mariah needs to be more social and involved in school activities and signs them both up to work in the prop department for their senior school play.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed the sequel, it wasn't nearly as good as its predecessor. I guess I just loved the first one so much that a sequel could never live up to the first one. However, I thought it was better than some of the other books in the sweet dreams series because it seemed to build on the relationship between Mariah and Dan instead of waiting until the last 10-15 pages to have the girl magically snag the boy and fall in love without having much interaction. Barbara Conklin did a fantastic job of showing the emotions of losing your first love to death. It also did a great job of the characters realizing that they may not be as close to each other when they left for college because so many high school friends think they'll be best friends forever no matter what. I love that she set up that expectation for the readers.
Now that I have finished Falling In Love Again, I wish there was a couple more sequels that covered Mariah in college and then after college to see if her friendship with Amy survived those years and if her romance with Dan did as well. Her relationship to him likely woudn't have seeing as they were at different schools and long distance relationships being really hard to maintain, especially before the internet made it much easier to stay in contact with one another.
Curious about what happened to Barbara Conklin, I did a Google Search but found very little information beyond book listings on various websites. There didn’t seem to be much substantial biographical information available. Since P.S. I Love You and Falling In Love Again were both published in the early 1980s, it’s unlikely there will ever be additional sequels.
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