Sticky Fingers

December 1, 2005
Gr 7 Up -Jenna receives Early Action admission to Harvard just before Christmas break of her senior year. Her boyfriend, Scott, thinks it's the perfect time for her to let loose -literally -and have sex with him. Though she is in love with him, Jenna knows she's not ready. Meanwhile, her friend Courtney is acting out of character, shoplifting, lying, and losing too much weight. Jenna also notices that Courtney and Scott are spending time together without her and she overhears heated arguments between them. The suburban Massachusetts setting is just right but the first-person narrative grows tedious as Jenna frets copiously about Courtney and Scott's behavior. The action moves slowly and uneventfully until Scott slips a date-rape drug into Jenna's drink. At this point, the mood goes quickly from frivolous to grave and the neat epilogue doesn't fit the severity of Jenna's trauma. As in Patrick Jones's "Things Change" (Walker, 2004), the intended message is that even smart girls can be fooled by abusers or rapists. Though Jenna is sharper and more likable than Jones's protagonist, her Harvard acceptance is a cheap symbol of the intelligence that is never shown in her thoughts. The frothy dialogue and tongue-in-cheek prose are better suited to Burnham's teen romances than to this consciously serious and issue-driven story." -Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2005
Gr. 9-12. From the cover photo (a boy wrapped around his girlfriend, her hand grazing his butt), one might get the wrong idea about what the title refers to. But no--heroine Jenna's best friend, Courtney, is a shoplifter. And although the petting sessions in the story may raise a few eyebrows, the ironic crux of the tale is that Jenna doesn't have enough sex in her life. She's a Harvard-bound senior with goals, but she's distracted by her boyfriend's pressure to have intercourse. Scott appears to be a terrific guy who supports Jenna's decisions about sex, so it's a surprise when he drops a roofie in her drink. Burnham tries to have it both ways--providing titillation but also taking the moral high ground in an author's note about date-rape drugs. There's much that's unbelievable (Courtney doesn't reveal that Scott has been trying to get the drug, and he gets into Harvard despite his arrest). Yet the voices are authentic, the concerns are real, and Jenna comes across as a girl whose confidence shows her what's right for her.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)