Tabitha is lonely.

Over the last few months — the last year or so, really — things in her life have changed quite a bit. Her parents, who had her when they were mere teenagers themselves, are expecting a new baby. Tab’s body has changed significantly, too. She’s developed a shape, including boobs, that have garnered attention. She’s gotten so much attention, in fact, that it’s the reason her former friends have ditched her. They think she’s turned into a slutty girl, now that she’s got the appearance of one.

And maybe Tab has changed more than just in her appearance. She can’t seem to stop thinking about Joe, the boy who has a girlfriend named Sasha.

The boy who admitted to liking her late one night.

The boy who kissed her.

Enter Life By Committee: an anonymous, online group of teens who make a deal to keep each other’s secrets safe and secure in exchange for following through with an assignment meant to help the secret teller stretch him or herself. There is a time limit to completing the assignments and failure to complete means those secrets may not be kept safe.

Tab finds Life By Committee by accident. She’s obsessed with note taking in novels — her way of close reading — and she likes to then exchange the book she’s written in for copies of other favorite books to see what other people have written in the margins. It was in flipping through a used copy of The Secret Garden her dad picked up for her she found out about the site.

Corey Ann Haydu’s sophomore novel Life By Committee tackles some interesting aspects of growing up and learning how to navigate the social dynamics that accompany physical change. Tab lives in a small Vermont town where everyone knows everyone else, or so it seems. When her body begins to develop, she’s on the outs with her friends because of the assumptions they make about what her having that sort of body means. Because she’s blonde and because she’s well-developed, they believe she’s heading on a path that means she’s more interested in the attention of boys than she is in being a friend.

In some ways, her friends are right and in other ways, they’re not. Their assumptions impress ideas upon Tabitha, who is indeed interested in boys, including Joe. But Tab also has another boy she’s been interested in, and he happens to be the brother of one of her now-former best friends. So indeed, she is interested in boys, but her interest in them isn’t at the level her friends have suggested. Because we’re inside Tabitha’s mind, too, we’re able to see where she begins to struggle with the perception of who she is and the reality of who she is and what she wants.

She likes these boys, but she’s torn about how much she likes them and why she likes them. Physical contact with Joe feels nice, but the emotional intimacy she develops with him via their online chats is nice too. She’s well-aware, too, of what comes with Joe: his girlfriend Sasha. Does Tab feel bad about making out with a boy who is taken? Yes and no. She knows it’s not right, but she also believes Joe when he tells her he’s not that into Sasha anymore.

When Tab dives into Life By Committee, her first assignment comes as a result of her admitting to kissing Joe even though he has a girlfriend. She’s told she needs to kiss him again, and she does. While she doesn’t do it immediately, she does complete the job before deadline, and in doing so, she’s afforded more opportunity to think about what it is she may want in a relationship with him.

Her second secret and second assignment has to do with her father, who has a problem with smoking pot. This secret, one that Tab held deep inside her, is met with the assignment that she’s to smoke pot with him. It’s not meant to get her high nor meant to show her some new side of why he chooses to do what he does to cope with life; it’s instead meant to be a wakeup call to her father — and it becomes just that, too.

What Tab takes from Life By Committee, though, isn’t so much the secret-telling and the assignment-completing. It’s instead a sense of community. Even though she’s at a distance, she finds herself drawn to the other anonymous people partaking in this online group. Who are they? What do their secrets say about them? How and where are they able to complete these assignments and what does success for them look like beyond the assignments? Are they finding love? Happiness? Creative fulfillment?

The idea of Life By Committee comes together in the end of the book, and because it’d be spoiler to explain what happened, I won’t. I will say I saw it coming from pretty far away, and I felt that it was almost too neat a bow on top of the story. I don’t know if that will be the case for all readers, particularly teens, who might see the ending as the kind of outcome Tabitha deserved to have for herself. For me, the idea of Life By Committee more broadly felt a little too convenient and a little too styled in terms of crafting a bigger narrative arc than I prefer. It wasn’t that it was too easy for Tabitha, but rather, it felt a little too easy for getting Tabitha from point A to point B in the story.

Life By Committee‘s strength lies in its character development and in the way it renders how painful it is to feel lonely and like you do not have friends you can rely on. But it’s done in a way that’s smart: Tabitha isn’t necessarily an easily likable character, but she’s easy to feel sympathy and empathy for. This is a girl who is knowingly pursuing a boy who has a girlfriend and Tabitha seems determined to find every bit of Sasha that’s repulsive or annoying and pack it away as evidence for why it’s okay for her to pursue Joe — even though she knows deep down it’s not okay. At the same time, Joe leads Tab on very clearly, and it’s hard to dislike what she does completely because she’s getting all the cues that it’s okay with him. Likewise, Tab’s home life and the changes to come soon because of the new baby, only make her emotional and mental states more complex.

Haydu does well in tackling the complicated body image elements with Tab. In many ways, it was novel to read a book where one becomes so conscious of themselves and the physical changes they’re going through in a way that’s not about weight. It’s about shape and about the way people react to one another during puberty. In many ways, this hit really close to home for me: Tab talks about clothing and how now that she has a different shape, people have commented upon how it’s not appropriate for her to be wearing certain things because it could draw unwanted attention. As a girl who developed large breasts when I was young, this is something I found myself being told quite a bit, and it was something that always made me feel a sense of shame because so little could deemphasize the fact my body now had a new shape. That shame and that sense of wanting to crawl inside yourself because of changes you have absolutely no control over were palpable through Tab and her experiences.

Some of the secondary characters weren’t fully developed, and I didn’t necessarily find myself compelled by the budding romance in the story — either the one Tab has with Joe (if that could be considered a romance) or the one that we find out may exist between Tab and another boy. I wanted to get to know Sasha better, primarily because I felt she was redeemed later on in the story in such a way that she seemed like a really interesting character. Tab’s limited perspective and insight on her as simply the weird girl who is Joe’s girlfriend left me wanting a little more.

Pass Life By Committee on to readers who like realistic YA and who are particularly eager for stories about friendship — or what happens when friendships go sour. Perhaps more than a book about friendship, Haydu’s novel is really about peer relationships and the sorts of feedback loops that exist within them. Fans of Siobhan Vivian should really enjoy Life By Committee.

Review copy received from the publisher. Life By Committee is available now.