Erica Lorraine Scheidt’s debut Uses for Boys is daring and unafraid — this book is candid in topic, so if sex in young adult fiction is a topic that interests you, here you go.

Anna, age five, was all her mother needed. She doted upon Anna, and Anna loved it. This was what it meant to be a family. To feel like everything was right and good. Anna never knew her dad, but the love given to her by her mother was more than enough.

Then her mom started dating again. Then her mom got married again. Then divorced. Then started dating again. Then got married again. Then divorced. This cycle defined the relationship between Anna and her mother. No longer was Anna all mom needed. It was the men. It was the husbands. It was the lives those men gave her mother.

Anna gets lost in this life. She falls out of her mother’s attention. When she turns thirteen, Anna has the first taste of being the center of attention again, but this time, it comes from a boy on the school bus. He grabs her breast. She likes the way it makes her feel, like she means something to him. But, he does it for show, and he gets a good laugh out of the entire event. Anna loses her only friend because she’s labeled easy, because the way she let that boy touch her made her a bad person.

Alone again, Anna seeks out other boys. If it’s good for her mother, then it’s got to be good for her, too. She finds Joey. He treats her well, and they have a lot of sex. In fact, he is the first boy to teach her how her body can feel sexually. She likes this. But it’s not too long before Joey is ripped away from her, either. He moves from Portland to Seattle.

By this point, Anna’s in a new home, there’s a new stepdad and a new step family. That changes not long after a family trip to a resort. One where — spoiler — Anna becomes a rape victim. Where she doesn’t stop the boy from taking even more from her. Her sexual independence is, of course, compromised, despite the fact she was never truly sexually independent in the first place. She wasn’t owning it. She was submitting to it out of the belief that was how things worked. It was what made her mom the way she was. It was what made Anna no longer a thing needed.

Then, Anna meets Toy. Toy’s the girl she runs into at Goodwill while shopping. Toy is the girl Anna wants to be. Toy comes from a broken family, too, but she’s got boyfriends who care about her so much. There’s the one who buys her all kinds of things. The one who wants to take her traveling. The one who loves her unconditionally. These are all the things Anna wants and just doesn’t get with her boys. Anna convinces herself repeatedly that she is good. That what she’s getting sexually is what she needs. It makes her wanted. It makes her loved.

There is another boy, Josh. This time, though, Anna is convinced he’s the real deal. She loves him so much and he loves her, too. Anna’s mom is absent all of the time, and being alone in the big house isn’t what she wants. So Anna decides it’s time to make some hard choices: she moves out and into Josh’s apartment in Portland proper. She also drops out of school and takes a job instead. Then there is a lot of sex. But in reading between the lines, it’s clear Anna isn’t feeling this relationship. Maybe she’s not in love with Josh quite the way she thinks she should be. He’s kind of a loser. He has no ambitions. He wants to go no where. The apartment stinks, and he never has the interest in making it better.

Here’s a spoiler paragraph, so skip down if you need to. Anna finds out she’s pregnant with Josh’s baby. And while Josh is an incredible supportive character when she makes the decision to have an abortion, it’s here when Anna has her true turnaround. It’s a choice she makes to not have the baby. It’s a choice she lives with. It’s a choice that ultimately forces her to choose to move out of Josh’s and into a new place. To let him out of her life completely. Throughout this, Anna has a touch-and-go relationship with Toy. Toy’s continually with her own boys who dote on her. With her own boys that take her time away from Anna. With, as it turns out, a fantasy life. That’s her escape from her own loneliness.

When Anna moves into her own place, her mom pops back in the picture, but only to criticize her. Why won’t she go back to school and make something of herself? Why won’t she move back to the house in the suburbs?

If it weren’t obvious, there is another boy. Sam. But this boy is the right one. This is the boy who teaches Anna what it means to love, the boy who teaches Anna what a family is and what a family can do for a person. Sam’s also a virgin. Sam doesn’t push Anna into sex. Instead, he teaches her how to appreciate and respect her body, her sexuality, and most importantly, her own choices. Sam and his family (his mother in particular — who is a great adult character, despite her short page time) give Anna the gift of learning to love herself and own her choices for herself.

Uses for Boys is not a boy-saves-girl story. The person who saves Anna in this story is Anna alone. She makes questionable choices throughout her entire life, and she loses a lot of herself in doing so. These choices aren’t likable ones. She has a lot of meaningless sex, and she ascribes a lot of meaning to the way boys treat her, even when there is no meaning to be ascribed. She does this because this is what she’s seen and grown up with. Her mother did exactly this and taught Anna that was how things work. That her life and her choices were dependent upon men. That men came and went. That men were what got you a house, got you a life, and got you a future.

Anna is probably not a likable character. This is because of her choices and because they don’t make a lot of sense. But that’s the entire point — choices are choices. They aren’t the definition of who you are. Anna’s mom made choices. It didn’t mean that when she needed to be there for Anna, she wouldn’t be (she is, though she herself isn’t likable in those moments, either). Anna is a smart, strong female; the trouble and the point is that she’s crushed under the models of life she’s seen around her, she’s lived with, she’s befriended, and that she believes the world puts upon her.

Scheidt’s writing is short and staccato. The chapters span between a single paragraph and a couple of pages. Though a lot of living and a lot of events happen, the way it’s captured through Anna’s voice works. There aren’t short cuts here, and never do any of the issues feel like they’re crushed beneath others. That’s because despite the choices, Anna continues to live, to grow, to think, and to hope. This is a brisker read, but there’s a lot to tease out.

Hand Uses for Boys off to readers who like Amy Reed or Ellen Hopkins. This is a near perfect read alike to Reed’s Beautiful, featuring a younger teen female caught up in a number of mature, heart-breaking situations and who struggles to make it through. There is sex in this book, and it is graphic, so readers who shy away from reading it will want to skip this book. But for the readers looking for an honest, aching, and brutal portrayal of teen sex will find Uses for Boys one of the best treatments.

Uses for Boys will be available now from St. Martin’s Press. Review copy received from the publisher. 

Is there anything more disappointing in the reading world than a sequel that fails to live up to its predecessor? Alas, it happens all too often. I’ve discussed a couple of recent disappointing sequels below. (I read both of these over a long weekend, making for a pretty unsatisfying few days reading-wise!)

Feedback by Robison Wells

Seconds Away by Harlan Coben

Grief and intimacy don’t seem like they’re entirely related things, but they are. The lines between them aren’t too far apart, and the way they can entangle fascinates me as a reader. In Lauren Strasnick’s Then You Were Gone, these lines are explored and exploited in a way that make readers question where and if they can be extracted from one another.

Adrienne and Dakota were best friends for a long time. But two years ago, they just stopped being friends. Adrienne was never quite sure why.

Flash forward to now. A voicemail on Adrienne’s phone from Dakota. It begs her to call back. But Adrienne waits. She doesn’t call back.

Then it’s too late.

Dakota goes missing, and she’s presumed dead. But she’s not just presumed dead. Everyone thinks she’s killed herself. See, Dakota’s life over the last couple of years has been about performance. She was in a band getting some recognition. She’d earned a reputation. A name for herself. But it wasn’t because she was great but because she was a little bit reckless. A little bit wild. So her going missing isn’t entirely a surprise, and it’s easy to see why someone who had built up so much would want to kill themselves. Especially because she never seemed happy.

But Adrienne isn’t going to settle that easily. Why was it Dakota reached out to her? There had to be a reason, and Adrienne needs to know.

In between this, though, is Adrienne’s relationship with boyfriend Lee. It’s steamy. It’s sensual. It’s sexy. Lee is good for Adrienne, and he treats her well. He cares for her, but he doesn’t do so in a way that makes her a weak girl or a fawn to him. Instead, she gains as much from the relationship as he does. But the further Adrienne obsesses about Dakota’s disappearance, the further away from Lee she pulls. The further away from herself she pulls.

Adrienne wants to get to know Julian better. He’s in her lit class — her favorite class, the one she does best in, the one taught by Nick Murphy who really thinks Adrienne is something special. Julian was the last guy to be with Dakota and, she thinks, the last one to see her alive. As Adrienne finds the courage to talk to him, it becomes much more than talk. It becomes something heavier. Together, the two of them are grieving the loss. More than that, though, together, the two of them are finding intimacy. It’s not with one another though. It’s with their shared memory of Dakota.

See, Adrienne has started to dress like Dakota. Has started to take on the persona of Dakota. She’s living in the image she saw and believed to be Dakota of now. And Julian wants to still be with Dakota. So now that Adrienne is playing the part, so will he. He wants to be with Adrienne not because he likes Adrienne but he likes to imagine she is Dakota. Adrienne is game. Adrienne is leading. But the moment when the two of them are naked — that moment right before they’re about to have sex — Adrienne wakes up and has the horrible realization of what’s going on. Neither she nor Julian are in this for themselves. For who each other is. Rather, they’re playing the role of Dakota. Adrienne living as her, Julian buying into the image.

It’s this moment when Adrienne realizes she needs to find Dakota and figure out why it is she left. Because Adrienne doesn’t believe for a moment that she’s dead.

Then You Were Gone doesn’t offer readers everything. It’s short, fast-paced, and it’s written in a very minimalistic style. It’s because that’s how Adrienne thinks and processes. She wants the immediate answer. She wants the solution. She wants to push through to get there. But as much as the plot moves quickly, Strasnick is smart in her use of sensual, romantic moments between Lee and Adrienne to slow the pacing down a bit. To give us real insight into who they are. We learn that Lee really and truly is a good guy. Adrienne, at her core, is a good girl. But it’s that grief, that missing, that longing for her former best friend, that drives her to become someone who she isn’t. Even though we know Adrienne is an average student, we know she loves her lit class. She loves the teacher and the content. The grief, though, hits her so hard that she begins to not care. She begins to fail in that class too, and interestingly, it is her only class with Julian. A sign, maybe?

Spoilers abound in the next two paragraphs, so proceed accordingly.

It turns out that Dakota’s not dead at all. She’s gone away. She’s become fed up with people seeing her and believing her to be a certain kind of person. What Adrienne’s done in her grieving of Dakota is flash back to their friendship. To those moments right before things fell apart. Dakota pushed Adrienne to talk about love and to admit to admiring her wholeheartedly. To kissing her, to feeling her physically even though Adrienne wasn’t necessarily comfortable with it (she was mentally, but the actual, physical doing of it wasn’t okay with her). These scenes highlight what was wrong with Dakota and what made her want to leave: she was too easily able to manipulate people, and through that manipulation — through that playing and toying with other people — she lost the sense of who she was to herself. She realized she was nothing but an idea and image to others because that was all she’d become to herself. She had no true intimacy with anyone. It was all a game.

The truth of the mystery is that it was teacher Nick Murphy who finally drove Dakota away. She’d become pregnant from him. She couldn’t face him, couldn’t face herself, and certainly, she couldn’t raise a baby. While this was a twist in the plot — we’d been led to believe what a great guy Nick was — I didn’t necessarily buy it. I didn’t get to know him well enough, and I didn’t know what his relationship with Dakota was at all, since all of what we learn comes from Adrienne’s perspective. Adrienne and Dakota hadn’t been friends for two years, so there is a huge gap in knowledge and history. I wish this hadn’t been the outcome because there were a number of alternatives. That said, I suspect some readers could argue that Dakota made this story up (she is dodgy when she and Adrienne reunite), but since Adrienne presses her teacher about it, he relents (which, could be argued is because he’s a teacher and fearful of losing his position were any sort of accusations to emerge).

Strasnick’s prose is tight, and her story compelling. It’s, at times, sexy but the grief undercuts it in a way to make these moments more than passing moments of physical interaction. They’re intimate. They’re whole and naked moments of people being honest and true with one another. As I noted earlier, this is when we really learn who Adrienne and Lee are as individuals. And because Dakota couldn’t feel those moments in her life, that’s why she felt a fake. That’s why when Adrienne and Julian have their encounter, it falls apart. Adrienne is more than simply a shadow of Dakota. Grief is, of course, an intimate experience because it is utterly unique to every individual who experiences it. Having grief work in tandem with intimacy only amplified both experiences for the characters.

One of the smaller details I loved about the book was that Adrienne didn’t have a traditional family structure, nor was this non-traditional structure ever a problem. She lived with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend Sam — not step-father, as she points out once in the story. Sam loves Adrienne as his own, and they actually spend time together doing things. In fact, it’s Sam who reveals a small detail about Dakota that helps Adrienne solve the mystery at the end. He’s a cool character and it’s refreshing to read stories like this, where the parental structure isn’t either a happily married couple or a half a unit due to one member’s death. This is the reality of a lot of today’s teens.

There is a sweet ending to the story. It ties up the loose ends of romance and intimacy and grief in an unexpected but, I think, well-deserved way. This reminded me quite a bit of Kirsten Hubbard’s Like Mandarin, with Dakota playing the role of Mandarin quite well and Adrienne playing the role of Grace. It also combined many of the elements of a number of contemporary grief novels, too, and drawing these two things together just worked. Pass this off to readers looking for a book about friendship and grief, with a mystery and romance skimming the surface.

Then You Were Gone published on January 1 and is available now. Review copy received from the publisher.