Want to Go Private? by Sarah Darer Littman

Abby has always been the smart, well-behaved girl. Very reliable & dependable for anything really. Moving up to high school is just another step towards accomplishing all that she has worked so hard for in school. But, it's different. The good things aren't the same & the bad things are just more prominent. With a best friend turning into a social butterfly, Abby turns to a teen website for chatting & socializing. That's where she meets Luke.

Luke is charismatic, cute, supportive & everything Abby wants; but he is far from what she needs. Despite dating Billy, her lab partner, Abby is drawn to Luke's presence & needs him in her life. She doesn't think anything of telling him very personal details & even accepts gifts from him. It's all fun & games until Abby starts spending so much time with him online that she begins to neglect her studies & her real life. After a particularly nasty fight with her parents Luke suggests a weekend getaway to "teach them a lesson." Abby falls for it & begins a nightmare that she will never live down.

Want to Go Private? was a haunting tale that mirrors real life so much it scares me. Abby is a brilliant young woman who is at one of the most vulnerable stages in life. Feeling isolated & lacking self-esteem, she turns to the one person who knows how to make her feel better. Luke is a prime example of the scariest type of urban predator. He preys on vulnerable girls & uses their own issues against them, to hurt them. The storyline between these two characters was so authentic, I felt like I myself at 14 could have been wooed by his abilities.

This book is a bit more graphic than I was expecting simply because I wasn't 100% sure how far the author would expose the characters. Sarah Littman goes all in, sparing no detail to get across just how awful things turned out for Abby. The author also shows how things can be turned around & start to look up. While this is a difficult subject matter, the book was filled with hope & the message that we need to be just as careful electronically as we are in person.

An amazing read that I couldn't put down, Want to Go Private? is as striking & authentic as Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. If the subject matter doesn't bother you & you want to read something gripping, then this is your book.

ARC graciously provided by Around the World Tours.

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Want to Go Private? by Sarah Darer Littman

Stay by Deb Caletti

Clara is in hiding. Christian, the love of her life, turned out to be a bit troubled (okay, a lot troubled), so her father has whisked her away to a remote island for the summer. She's been forced to get a summer job while she regroups about her college plans for the fall. With a famous author for a father & a long-deceased mother, Clara has been able to convince everyone in her life that they're touring Europe while he writes his latest best seller.

Things that Clara doesn't understand: how she let things get so out of control with Christian, what she's going to do in the fall, why her afraid-of-the-open-water father chose to spend the summer on an island, & how she really feels about sailing boy Finn. Regrouping is harder than she thought it would be because she spent so much time anticipating Christian's reactions & adjusting her behavior to suit his demands that she doesn't know much about who she really is on the inside.

When Christian starts calling her non-stop, despite changing her number several times, and she begins to feel like someone is watching her constantly, Clara decides that there is only so much hiding one can do before you must face your fears.

This was the first Deb Caletti book I've ever read & I think I may have been missing out on something. I thought this was going to be a gritty, emotionally taxing book, but Caletti only skims the surface of the dangerous relationship. She shows us all the signs of danger & really draws the tension tight, so much so that I actually gasped a few times regarding the characters' behavior.

Clara is not a helpless character at all. She is simply naive & a bit consumed by the idea of love. She wants to badly to be in love with Christian & to have something solid & consistent that she finds herself clinging to an even more unstable mess than her home life. Christian is not an unsympathetic character. I can see where a girl could be easily drawn in by him, but his actions spoke volumes. An even more compelling aspect of the book were the relationships between the adults on the island. They were so much more complex & foreboding that they really added something to the story.

Told with flashbacks to her relationship with Christian, Stay was a phenomenal book with just the right touches of everything. I hope you enjoy it too! Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Stay by Deb Caletti

Bitter End by Jennifer Brown

Alex is a level-headed girl for the most part. As level-headed as she can be for a girl raised with the ghost of her long-dead mother & a scarcely present father. The most stable thing in her life has always been her two best friends Zack & Bethany. This terrible trio has been bonded together by their love for one another & their constant graduation-trip-to-Colorado planning.

They spend almost all of their waking time together, until new boy Cole shows up and sweeps Alex off her feet. In just a matter of weeks this budding romance turns into a full-blown relaitonship that consumes all of Alex's free time. But as their relationship moves forward, Cole becomes more & more possessive of Alex & even becomes extremely jealous of her relationship with Zack & Bethany. Things worsened quickly as Cole lashed out at Alex for the simplest things: missing his basketball practice, staying late at work to talk to her boss. Any little thing could upset him.

Alex starts to sees these changes, but thinks that things will get better if she can be better. A slippery slope begins to form & Alex doesn't know where it will end. She wants to best of both worlds with her best friends & Cole, but she doesn't know how to make it a reality; or if she'll make it through Cole's next temper-tantrum.

I must say that, despite having read the summary, this was not quite what I was expecting. There was a lot more depth to the story than an abusive boyfriend. The elements of Alex's mother's "mysterious" death, her devoted best friends, & her manager at her job all add something more to the story than I expected. All these things added more complexity to Alex & the storyline in general. Zack & Bethany were exactly what I would want & expect in best friends, especially ones together for so long.

While the story was compelling, the writing style was not at all like Brown's remarkable work in Hate List. This one was just told straight up with no intermittent articles. While there was some poetry written by the main character, it was not enough to break the flow. I think I would have enjoyed it more had there been some variance.

Overall this was an incredible book about a difficult subject that seems to be coming up more & more often in YA lit. Hopefully it is not in response to a growing trend among teenagers in general. Have you read Bitter End? What did you think? What do you think about the premise in general?

Bitter End by Jennifer Brown