Torn Away by Jennifer Brown 
May 6, 2014
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
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Jersey Cameron has always loved a good storm. Watching the clouds roll in and the wind pick up. Smelling the electricity in the air. Dancing barefoot in the rain. She lives in the Midwest, after all, where the weather is sure to keep you guessing. Jersey knows what to do when the tornado sirens sound. But she never could have prepared for this.

When her town is devastated by a tornado, Jersey loses everything. As she struggles to overcome her grief, she’s sent to live with relatives she hardly knows-family who might as well be strangers. In an unfamiliar place, can Jersey discover that even on the darkest of days, there are some things no tornado can destroy?

In this powerful and poignant novel, acclaimed author Jennifer Brown delivers a story of love, loss, hope, and survival.

First sentence: “Marin wanted to teach me the East Coast Swing. “

Oh, Torn Away, I wish I was swept away with emotions, but alas, that wasn’t the case.

Torn Away tells a story about Jersey Cameron, who loses everything she’s ever loved—her mother, her sister, her house, comfort, security—to a tornado that destroyed her town. It is essentially broken down into three parts—when the tornado occurs, when Jersey is sent to her biological father’s house (where everybody hates her), and when Jersery is sent to live with her maternal grandparents who have not spoken to Jersey or her mother for the past 16 years.

Am I coldhearted that I didn’t feel particularly sad for Jersey when tragedy struck her family? I just felt disconnected and indifferent. Here is this horrible thing that happened, and that’s it. I didn’t particularly care for Jersey since I didn’t connect with her on an emotional level. If you were to ask me what stood out about Jersey (besides the things that happened to her) a week from now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything. She’s quite a forgettable character; there’s nothing about her that makes her standout—not her interests or her personality. She was just normal. She did and expressed her emotions in a way that was understandable. I wanted to feel her grief, her anger, her every emotion, but the lack of emotional connection to her character formed a barrier I couldn’t get past.

I never felt rooted in the story, nor did I feel like I understood the characters. The characters didn’t have any depth that made me understand them. Everything I knew about them was on a surface level. What do I know about her father? Besides the fact he’s a ridiculous and horrible person? Nothing. And what about her maternal grandmother? Uhhhh, I can’t say too much about her. It doesn’t help that the book is broken down into parts, and in them, I feel like I’m watching them behind a glass, never close enough to feel the emotions, the loss, the fear.

Torn Away would’ve been a book I loved, if I connected with the characters. Unfortunately, I did not. The book was like a case study to me. It was creating awareness for what can happen in the case of a natural disaster, and what can happen to those people who are suddenly without a home or a family, instead of connecting emotionally with the characters and what is happening.

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.

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