The Quick Cut: Three high school students find themselves in big trouble when a teacher's nude pictures end up online with them looking like the culprits.
A Real Review:
Thank you to Amulet Books for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Psychological thrillers are a real double edged sword. You want to hold the suspense long enough to keep your audience on the edge of their seats, but not so long they stop caring. It can be difficult to get right and an absolute delight when an author perfects this balance. When it comes to "Easy Prey", Catherine Lo did a phenom of a job with that.
In Miss Bailey's law class, three students end up in a group together: Mouse, Jenna, and Drew. You can't find a more different group if people to mash together and all of them are surprised to be forced to work as a team for this project. Drew is a jock who is all charm and takes advantage of it... along with his teammates. Mouse is a genius whose tired of being bullied by his dad and is willing to do many a bad thing to make money and get away from him (and into his dream college MIT). Jenna is a girl whose racy photos ended up online last year and hasn't been the same since - a good girl turned rebel who finds that no one sees how what happened to her shouldn't be the girl's fault.
These three start their project and quickly end up playing a game with their teacher Miss Bailey by pretending to be a guy on her dating site. Things escalate (you'll find out when you read!) and suddenly nude pictures of their law teacher end up in their hands. Everyone promises to delete the photos and move on, but when they appear on a blog and the school is notified - who will end up being the one who leaked the photos of Miss Bailey?
This is such an amazing story how author makes it look like such a simple story and then rips the rug out from under you in those last couple pages. Watching the end play out totally changes your perspective and definitely changed how I looked at these characters. A big moral question asked here is who is responsible when someone's privacy is broken? Why is the blame put on women so often when guys lash out? What's considered crossing the line? I got to end of the line and dropped my jaw in shock, but unsure of some of the answers to these questions. It's a great sign when a book makes you question your perspective and reconsider your outlook.
A book that thrills and taunts, this one is a must read!
My rating: 5 out of 5