First of all: if your parents are friends with a creepy guy who keeps touching you in a creepy way speak up for yourself! Especially if your parents enrol him as a "babysitter" for the night. Especially if he prepares you a candlelit dinner! Especially if your parents invite him to live with you! Don't wait until you are attacked to denounce him, don't wait until it's too late. Things generally don't go as shown by Sarah Dessen in this book: no angel will save you at the last minute, don't be passive. 
 I generally don't like books with too passive heroines, particularly heroines whose only personality trait is being addicted to reality show where rich women quarrel and complain about their lives. Particularly heroines who think that long, aimless conversations about french fries, lollipops and pizzas are interesting and worthy to be retold in detail. 
 Therefore I found almost every character in this book irksome or plainly boring: Sidney, the protagonist basks in her passivity, her new best friend Layla seems mainly stupid and superficial, her mother is a delusional control-freak and her father a stunning example of indifference. 
 I kept reading the book only because I found the premise interesting: a teenage girl guilt-ridden by a crime committed by her older brother, the family's balance upturned by the careless behaviour of one of its member. However this theme evolves along predictable, unimaginative lines, everything is solved even if none of the characters really tries to improve the situation, the message passed by the author being that if you keep you head down and obey your parents things will be eventually solved by "higher powers" (or coincidences). Ugh!