Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown
Reviewed by Maggie Devero
Do you really believe it when people say that an electronically uploaded picture of yourself stays on the internet even after you think it's gone? That there's no privacy whatsoever? Ashleigh Maynard finds this out the hard way, after a pool party, a few drinks, and a bad decision. At the time, it had seemed a good idea...she missed her constantly preoccupied college boyfriend Kaleb, and it was a way to get his attention focused directly back on her. Unfortunately, this doesn't remain as intimate as Ashleigh had hoped and she is soon faced with sixty hours of community service for a crime she didn't realize she was technically committing. Through this scandal, both family and friends shy away from her and this unwanted connection to the whole problem. Only one person acts at all sympathetic to the scandal and even friendly to her, and this boy is doing community service for something she doesn't know. She struggles with accepting the outcome of the entire event, and learning to deal with it almost alone. During this time, Ashleigh truly learns that "a picture is worth a thousand words, but they don't tell the whole story."
When I first opened the book, and got an idea of the storyline, I honestly was expecting to lose all interest super quickly. A plot even slightly including high school love can be very unappealing when you hear about it day in and day out, both in real high school life and almost every other YA fiction book you pick up. As I pushed through though more chapters, it mostly moved past that topic, throwing in a few twists that at I personally didn't see coming. So I gave it three stars because it was overall a book that I'd enjoyed reading, but isn't anything that will stand out on its own in recent YA standards, nor something I would go back to read again. The author, Jennifer Brown, has also written a couple other books, called Hate List and Bitter End. The topics of those are more angsty than this one, which is the reason I preferred them over Thousand Words. Still, if you enjoy drama, and learning-to-cope-with-your-problems type books, then you will definitely like this one.
