"Being real could hurt. Being loved could hurt. That's what...what living is all about and the opposite is unimaginable." 
 I picked The Problem With Forever up on a whim and I have to say I was not disappointed, even though I knew next to nothing about the book. 
 Don't make a sound. 
 Mallory Dodge has a traumatizing past, and is slowly working through her problems with the help of her adoptive parents. But she still feels stagnant, trudging through her past like thick mud that she keeps sinking in, seemingly ever stuck. She can't seem to gather the courage to beat her past, and the ever shielding wall she is using as a barrier between her and everyone else: silence. 
 All of her progress, or lack thereof, is put at risk when she decides to stop being homeschooled and attend public school, even going so far as to take a speech class- and she runs into a boy from her past. 
 A boy that kept her past from being utterly void of goodness and hope, a boy that was her shining light in her once dark world. As he turns to her, familiar yet grown since she last saw him, he breathes just one word that begins a chain of events that could crumble the future she has been building for, or make it into something much more. 
 "Mouse?" 
 This book made it hard not to feel for the characters at every turn of events. It made me realize, like JLA mentioned in the acknowledgments, that there just may be a little of Mallory "Mouse" in all of us. This rang true with me, while even though I don't have a traumatizing past like Mallory's, but I've always found it difficult to talk to others and could definitely empathize with her struggle through her PTSD to find the words within herself. 
 All of the characters have their own world, own problems, and JLA grazes against each of them, but they never overshadow the main focus or the main characters. Everything happens for a reason and comes together perfectly to create a meaningful and satisfying conclusion. 
 I gave this book a 4/5 stars because it was really good but never reached full-blown awesomeness, but it is definitely a book I would recommend to fans of realistic YA contemporary romance with a dash of psychology/sociology.