Easy Prey | Book Review

Easy Prey

Written by: Catherine Lo

Number of Pages: 346

Average Rating: 3.70 / 5 stars

My Rating: 4 / 5 stars

Published: October 16, 2018

Read in April 2019

Summary According to Goodreads

Only three students had access to a teacher’s racy photos before they went viral. There’s Mouse, a brainy overachiever so desperate to escape his father and go to MIT that he would do almost anything, legal or not. Then there’s Drew, the star athlete who can get any girl’s number - and private photos - with his charm but has a history of passing those photos around. And finally there’s Jenna, a good girl turned rebel after her own shocking photos made the rounds at school last year, who is still waiting for justice. 

All three deny leaking the photos but someone has to take the fall. 

This edgy whodunit tackles hot-button issues of sexting and gossip, and will have readers tearing through the pages to reach the final reveal. 

My Thoughts

I received a physical ARC of this novel while attending BEA in 2018, as well as an ebook copy from NetGalley, but that does not affect my opinion.

If you have been keeping up with my social media, you will know that in January I went back to university and have been way too busy to read for pleasure. I am winding down the semester and over the holiday break decided I would pick up this book since I had been eyeing it for a while and I am SO glad that I did. I managed to break through my reading slump and finish this book in less than 48 hours, I could not seem to put it down!

My reading taste leans very heavily toward mystery and psychological thrillers, with a certain passion for dark contemporaries discussing “taboo” topics - and this novel had it all! There are essentially two mysteries being investigated in this novel, who posted the pictures of the teacher, and Jenna is still trying to find out who posted her own pictures a year prior. Throughout the novel the three characters become “friends” while working on a group project, and hints about both of these online incidents start coming to light. The ending was not one that I had anticipated, but I am glad that it unfolded as it did as it brought a new theme to the novel (which I won’t discuss for spoilers sake). 

I enjoyed all three of the characters, I think that they worked well together and reading from their perspectives. The novel takes place in multiple settings and I enjoyed reading they others perspectives when they would visit each others houses. Throughout the novel you could see slight developments in each of them, but the one that grew the most, and my favourite, was Jenna. Jenna started the novel as a quiet girl receding into herself after a trauma, still feeling victimized and bullied a year after her nude pictures were leaked. By the end of the novel Jenna was much more assertive and presented a strong character that I think is very important in these types of stories. 

I have read a few comments posted by fellow readers, and the biggest complaints seem to be the juvenile writing and the cliche ending. I understand these perspectives but I do have to disagree, specifically with the writing style. This novel changes between three perspectives, two male and one female seniors in high school. These students are barely eighteen years old, and I found it more realistic having their perspectives written as they’d be thinking, in an almost continuous thought process. My issue with this novel and the reason that I could not give it five stars does come from the writing, in that there were a few times where I struggled to differentiate between Mouse’s and Drew’s perspective. I would have preferred for them to have more distinct tones considering their personalities are quite different from each other.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel and will likely purchase a finished copy for my shelves; not necessarily because I will reread it but because I want to support more Canadian authors. I thought that this novel was well-written in both the plot development and that it kept me interested, and I will definitely be reading more of this authors work in the future.