Hey guys, I so happy to be part of the Tasty Book Tours party for Naked by Stacey Trombley. This is the debut novel by Trombley and it had me intrigued strictly by the cover alone.You can find the rest of the tour stops here.
Release Date: July 7, 2015
Publisher: Entangled Teen
304 Pages
The best place to hide is in a lie...
I could never fit in to the life my parents demanded. By the time I was thirteen, it was too much. I ran away to New York City...and found a nightmare that lasted three years. A nightmare that began and ended with a pimp named Luis. Now I am Dirty Anna. Broken, like everything inside me has gone bad.
Except that for the first time, I have a chance to start over. Not just with my parents but at school. Still, the rumors follow me everywhere. Down the hall. In classes. And the only hope I can see is in the wide, brightly lit smile of Jackson, the boy next door. So I lie to him. I lie to protect him from my past. I lie so that I don't have to be The Girl Who Went Bad.
The only problem is that someone in my school knows about New York.
Someone knows who I really am.
And it's just a matter of time before the real Anna is exposed...
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Throw in a high school setting and it's Mean Girls all over again. Anna is the outcast who finds safety in other outcasts including an adorable nerd boy named Jackson. Jackson was the silver lining of this book, which wasn't shocking considering he was the silver lining for Anna. He rounded out her harsh edges and made her a warm character. The whole time you just wanted her to tell him the truth because you just knew it was going to come out at the worst time.
I could never fit in to the life my parents demanded. By the time I was thirteen, it was too much. I ran away to New York City...and found a nightmare that lasted three years. A nightmare that began and ended with a pimp named Luis. Now I am Dirty Anna. Broken, like everything inside me has gone bad.
Except that for the first time, I have a chance to start over. Not just with my parents but at school. Still, the rumors follow me everywhere. Down the hall. In classes. And the only hope I can see is in the wide, brightly lit smile of Jackson, the boy next door. So I lie to him. I lie to protect him from my past. I lie so that I don't have to be The Girl Who Went Bad.
The only problem is that someone in my school knows about New York.
Someone knows who I really am.
And it's just a matter of time before the real Anna is exposed...
This was one book where the cover drew me in. It was so simple, yet so completely raw. I just had to know what this book was about. Naked tells the story of Anna Rodriguez- a girl who ran away from home at the age of thirteen only to become a prostitute in New York City after meeting up with a man named Luis. In her naivety, Anna looks to Luis as some sort of savior, even after he sells her to another man like she's some sort of good. When Anna is arrested, a caring social worker takes her back home and tries to help her readjust to "normal" life. But the problem is, there was a reason Anna left and that reason seems to still be there.
I know this isn't the first book of it's kind, but it was the first book that I read involving teenage prostitution. It was a very gritty world that Trombley constructed, half that we viewed in flashbacks and half that we viewed in real time. There was her past in New York and then her present as a high school student back at home. But unfortunately Anna's reentry into her life isn't as smooth as one would like. Among the lies and the rumors that follow her around, someone knows her secret.
Anna was a complex character and it was hard at times to really understand her. The author waited forever to tell us the reasons Anna ran away and what exactly happened to her. We got flashes throughout the book, but nothing concrete. It made it hard to sympathize with her when there were no explanations for her actions. Another thing that bothered me was the constant reminder that Luis "saved" her. Almost on every page we were reminded of this fact to the point that I really got tired of hearing about it. Her naivety was showcased throughout the entire book. Anna was extremely frustrating but considering that she was raised in an unloving household and then lived as a prostitute, it's no wonder her personality was a little off.
There were other characters that helped make this book more than just angst - her other friends, the dog, her mom, even the social worker. All played pivotal parts in helping Anna come to terms with her past. Overall, an interesting read about a taboo topic.
Big thanks to Tasty Book Tours for allowing me to participate in this book tour!
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