Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown
May 21, 2013
Little, Brown and Company
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Ashleigh’s boyfriend, Kaleb, is about to leave for college, and Ashleigh is worried that he’ll forget about her while he’s away. So at a legendary end-of-summer pool party, Ashleigh’s friends suggest she text him a picture of herself — sans swimsuit — to take with him. Before she can talk herself out of it, Ashleigh strides off to the bathroom, snaps a photo in the full-length mirror, and hits “send.”
But when Kaleb and Ashleigh go through a bad breakup, Kaleb takes revenge by forwarding the text to his baseball team. Soon the photo has gone viral, attracting the attention of the school board, the local police, and the media. As her friends and family try to distance themselves from the scandal, Ashleigh feels completely alone — until she meets Mack while serving her court-ordered community service. Not only does Mack offer a fresh chance at friendship, but he’s the one person in town who received the text of Ashleigh’s photo — and didn’t look.
Acclaimed author Jennifer Brown brings readers a gripping novel about honesty and betrayal, redemption and friendship, attraction and integrity, as Ashleigh finds that while a picture may be worth a thousand words . . . it doesn’t always tell the whole story.
First sentence: “The community service I’d been court ordered to complete was held in one of the downstairs classrooms at the Chesteron Public Schools Central Office. “
You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” but what Ashleigh Maynard, the main character of Thousand Words, learns is that it’s not exactly the full picture, nor the whole story.
Thousand Word is about Ashleigh Maynard who texts her boyfriend a nude picture of herself, and it gets leaked out to the entire school body and goes viral. She is faced with the consequences of the leaked picture—she is called horrible names, she is ostracized by friends and family, and she is ordered to do community service. The story moves back and forth from the present day when Ashleigh is doing her community service to the sexting incident when it happened, showing how the incident grows out of control.
Oh boy, Jennifer Brown has done it again. This was such a well-written book about what happens when sexting goes wrong. It’s not condemning people who do it, but creates awareness that there are consequences. When I read this book, I was filled with a bit of anxiety because this is something that can happen to anybody.
