Easy by Tammara Webber

Easy by Tammara Webber
Series: Contours of the Heart #1
Genre: Contemporary
Release Date: November 6, 2012
Publisher: Penguin
Source: Bought
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When Jacqueline follows her longtime boyfriend to the college of his choice, the last thing she expects is a breakup two months into sophomore year. After two weeks in shock, she wakes up to her new reality: she's single, attending a state university instead of a music conservatory, ignored by her former circle of friends, and failing a class for the first time in her life.

Leaving a party alone, Jacqueline is assaulted by her ex's frat brother. Rescued by a stranger who seems to be in the right place at the right time, she wants nothing more than to forget the attack and that night - but her savior, Lucas, sits on the back row of her econ class, sketching in a notebook and staring at her. Her friends nominate him to be the perfect rebound.

When her attacker turns stalker, Jacqueline has a choice: crumple in defeat or learn to fight back. Lucas remains protective, but he's hiding secrets of his own. Suddenly appearances are everything, and knowing who to trust is anything but easy.

After having avoided New Adult books for so long, I was a little hesitant to pick up anything by Tammara Webber. However, I read her Between the Lines series and loved it, so I thought I would give Easy a try when I saw it in Barnes and Noble for $5. I wasn’t sure what to expect, because of my thing about going into books knowing nothing about them, and I was very surprised by what I found.

Easy is a story about a girl who is attacked and almost raped, is saved by a stranger, and then stalked by the would-be rapist. It’s intense, and deals with some tough issues, but it is oh-so-good. I was surprised to find that this isn’t really a story about a boy and a girl, a man and a woman, but it’s about a sexual assault survivor who is fucking awesome.

Jacqueline is attacked early on in the book, and throughout the story she has people spreading rumours about her, and she feels awful about herself. She goes through a phase of thinking that the assault was her fault, and that she could have somehow prevented it. But the entire message of this book is that it’s not her fault, and it’s never any woman’s fault if they are assaulted in that way. Webber handled the topic very well, in my opinion, and I was getting very emotional while I was reading.

Jacqueline goes through so much over the course of the book, and she changes as a person and that is fantastic. I loved her, and I was cheering for her the entire way through. The classes she was taking, the email exchanges, the self defence classes, were all brilliantly done and helped to develop Jacqueline’s character further, and Webber has created a brilliant character with Jacqueline.

The secondary characters are freakin’ awesome. I loved Jacqueline’s friends because they were constantly reassuring her and were so patient and kind. Lucas, the love interest, was also great, and totally not my type but I still wanted him and Jacqueline to get together. But, for me, the love story wasn’t the most important part of the book. At all. It was all about Jacqueline, and the overall message behind the story.

I did kind of enjoy the forbidden love thing, because that’s usually awesome, but in the grand scheme of things it didn’t really matter to me. Because I didn’t really feel much for Lucas… as in, I wasn’t attracted to him and I thought he was only important because Jacqueline considered him to be so, I won’t be reading the sequel to this book, because it’s all about him. I don’t really care about finding out more about him, which may sound harsh, but Easy was all about Jacqueline and her story, so I have no feelings towards the companion book.

If you enjoy reading contemporary stories that deal with darker, yet very important topics such as assault and rape, then I would highly recommend this book. Easy can be triggering, I’m sure, but it’s a fantastic book about a woman who survives a horrible attack with the help of her friends, and who comes to recognise that sexual assault would never be her fault.