Liz is a photographer. She captures things behind the lens, and it’s through this we understand her. But she’s not the center of this story — this story is about her best friend Kate and her brother Mike. Kate’s a mighty dancer and Mike a college boy but former athlete.

One Saturday night, during one of Kate and Liz’s regularly scheduled sleepovers, they have a fight. And it’s ugly. Things not meant to be said are said, and the two of them spend the night sleeping in separate ends of Liz’s house. When Liz wakes up the next morning, Kate is gone, and she accepts that this means there will be a lot of apologies to be made on Monday.

But oh, if it were only that easy.

What Liz comes to find out is that something much worse than a fight has happened. It involves Kate and Mike, and Liz has no idea whose side of this crime she’s on.

Exposed is told in sparse verse form, and though I went back on and forth on whether this style suited the story, I think in the end it really does. I’d have loved to have a better fleshed Liz and Kate, but because so much of Liz’s identity is wrapped up in being a photographer — a person on the periphery rather than the subject in focus — the story wouldn’t have been as powerful nor would we have so much investment in Liz’s internal thinking were it told more traditionally through prose. We want to know what Liz feels about this, but she can only give us so much. She has to tell Kate and Mike’s stories because she’s the photographer. The thing is, she can give us the angles and the perspectives and she can change up the lighting and speed as she wants to. And she does this through the verse. It’s both visual and linguistic. Stylistically, it’s spot on.

Although the book moves along at a speedy pace thanks to the verse, there are so many things packed into those lines that the reader is forced to slow down. I found myself at first a little unimpressed with the story. For the first fifty or seventy pages, I felt like nothing was really going on. But because I knew there was something big coming, I kept going, and when the big event happens, I immediately began the book over again. The light bulb clicked, and I made myself read things slower and piece the story together much the way Liz had to.

In finishing the book, I couldn’t help me reminded of Carol Lynch Williams’s Glimpse and what a fantastic readalike this is for that title. We have a very edgy topic at play, but it’s tackled delicately and through the eyes of a narrator who we come to trust quite well. This title will work well for fans of Ellen Hopkins, but I really think that stands out about the connection between Exposed and Glimpse is the narrator. In both, the narrator is both part of and not part of the central story, and we as readers are forced immediately to decide whether we believe them or want to believe them. Being able to convince your reader to buy the narrator through the use of verse is tough, and in both of these books, we’re not given tricks nor are we disappointed with our intuition at the end of the story. There is so much else at stake in the story and as a reader, I appreciate that I’m allowed to experience those along with the character and not feel betrayed. Of course, that’s not to say Hopkins does this in her stories — because she doesn’t — but her narrators are part of the story itself, rather than the vessel through which the story is told.

At the end of Marcus’s book, we don’t have a tidy clean conclusion. We’re still with Liz, behind the camera, trying to capture what it is we need to catch. I love these types of endings, and I think with the story itself, this is what we need.

I think this will be a book to watch — it’ll make a great readalike to not only the titles listed above, but also to Daisy Whitney’s The Mockingbirds. If you’ll remember, one of the key elements to this story was not on the victim but instead on justice; in Exposed, our main character goes through something quite similar. She’s not the victim, even though deep down she is and she, too, seeks justice for herself and her conscious.

Marcus’s debut is precisely what it promises: powerful. I cannot wait to see where this author takes us next. Exposed will hit book shelves February 22, so you have very little wait time left.