Meggin Reads Thirteen Plus One

WARNING: This book is the fourth in a series entitled The Winnie Years, written by Lauren Myracle, so if you haven't read the entire series, I strongly suggest you click on something else...of course, unless you're the kind of person who doesn't care much for spoilers...
Winnie Perry is just about ready for school to be over. But with the end of the school year comes many other endings, including her older sister, Sandra, leaving for college, and Winnie's boyfriend, Lars, planning on going away to Germany over the summer because of his mum's fellowship gathering there, oh, and her junior high school year ending, and she'd be a freshman the next school year. Winnie's best friend, Dinah, is also leaving; Dinah's parents want her to go to a summer camp where she can learn good leadership skills after Dinah gets peer pressured into stealing things for someone else. To escape the idea of being left behind, Winnie decides to help Dinah find the perfect summer camp, where Winnie will tag along. However, Winnie and Dinah's other friend, Cinnamon, gets left behind in the camp planning, but surprises them at making an appearance at the camp, saying she's staying with them. However, at camp, Winnie feels she is getting farther and farther away from Lars, relationship-wise.
This newest installment of the adventures of Winnie Perry seems to be focused on one main problem (with some side problems attached): Winnie's complicated relationship with Lars. While the romantically troubling plot is childishly riveting, I noticed that Myracle's writing style has changed in this book when compared to the others of this series. In the past three books, each installment chronicles a year of Winnie's life, using twelve chapters, one for each month, to describe her adventures. Each month, she encounters an issue that loosely contributes to the main plot of the story. Whereas in Thirteen Plus One, each chapter focuses on a small goal she plans to accomplish before she goes into her freshman year of high school. Instead of a whole year, the book starts from her fourteenth birthday in the spring to the middle of summer, and almost every chapter is focused on her worrying about Lars. Because of the many differences in this book compared to its prequels, I was a bit disappointed in the general formatting. Like Winnie, I don't respond all too well with change, and Lauren Myracle certainly has changed the style of writing mid-series. Usually, I think of series books as those with the same style or theme. For example, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events has set the tone of series books for me, most likely because it was the first book series I've ever read. In Unfortunate Events, the format of every book is the same: thirteen chapters in thirteen books with the same predictable plot throughout, and I thought that most series books would follow the same pattern. Of course, I was in elementary school when I assumed this, but the idea still sticks to me today because it's been with me for so long.
However, one could interpret the difference of Thirteen Plus One from the other books in the series as a result of Winnie reacting to change.