Once and For All is a 2017 young adult novel by Sarah Dessen.
Happily-ever-afters are Louna Barrett's job. Working for her mother, a high-end wedding planner, she guarantees that brides and grooms have the best day of their lives, even if her own lost love has made her stop believing in happy endings. Enter handsome, cocky serial dater Ambrose Little, whose charm instantly puts off Louna. As they grow closer, though, she begins to realize that perhaps Ambrose may be a second chance at love for her.
This novel contains examples of:
- Axes at School: Louna's summer fling, Ethan, died in a school shooting.
- Character Overlap: Par for the course with a Dessen novel.
- Auden, Eli, and Clyde from Along for the Ride reappear when Louna and Ethan get a late-night breakfast in Colby.
- Louna tells Ethan about a large angel sculpture outside of a realty office in Lakeview. It's pretty clear she's referring to one of Wes's (from The Truth About Forever) sculptures.
- Delia, also from The Truth About Forever, and her "everyone loves meatballs" mantra gets a mention.
- Family Business: Louna's mother runs a high-end wedding planning business. At the beginning, her only employees are her daughter and a friend to whom she is so close, they might as well be related.
- Long-Distance Relationship: In the backstory, Ethan and Louna had one after their brief summer fling. It was tragically cut short by Ethan's death in a school shooting.
- The Lost Lenore: Ethan is this for Louna.
- My Beloved Smother: Mrs. Lin certainly acts like one during Elinor's wedding.
- Promotion to Parent: Jilly, Louna's best girlfriend, has four younger siblings. She's always carting them around while their parents are running their food truck.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Like most of Sarah Dessen's books, it deals with topical issues. In this case, Louna's former boyfriend, Ethan, is killed in a school shooting. She caught some flak from readers for what they saw as insensitivity in writing this particular plotline. It's worth noting, though, that Dessen took this from a real experience with a real shooting in her hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.