Easy (review)

Talented fourteen-year-old photographer Jessica needs a self-portrait for an upcoming national art contest, but in the face of family changes (her father just left her mother for another woman) and her own maturation (she's feeling the awakenings of sexual and romantic longings), she's having trouble seeing herself clearly. Her restlessness leads her to recklessness, so one afternoon Jessica impulsively locks eyes with a strange young man driving by. A few conversations later, after telling him she's eighteen, Jessica is "head to head with his penis." The next day at a party she hooks up with high-school pretty-boy Jason, her long-term crush; though he ejaculates prior to any significant contact, he tells his friends a very different story, as Jessica discovers at the next party when she is taken upstairs to service his best friend. The subject of a teen mistaking sexual attention for affection is a familiar one in YA fiction, but Hoffmann invigorates it with taut, readable prose and plausible characterization: Jessica embodies the very real adolescent conflict between newly sexually mature bodies and still immature emotions, all overlaid by her reaction to her parents' behavior. Enriched by subplots involving photography, family drama, and the sting of best friends' growing up at different rates, this authentic narrative will encourage readers to think about the story behind the high-school gossip.