Searching for Amy

“Searching for Amy” by Becky Jones immerses readers into the life of a girl who has found herself in a terrible situation. When Amy decides to go to a party with her two best friends and the boy she likes, she hardly expects that everything will turn sour before she has a chance to fully process the past evening. Hanging out with Harry, her best friend Rosie’s cousin, seems perfect. She has had a crush on him, and Rosie says he likes her too. Everything is working in her favor, or so she thinks. When she makes a decision to hang out with Harry at the party, she soon also makes the choice to lose her virginity to him. It seems right to her. Finding someone she likes who likes her back is like two puzzle pieces fitting together. Her whole world is upended, though, when she finds out the next day from her other best friend, Maria, that the whole sexual encounter was not only videotaped, but publicly shared.

Amy’s feelings are catapulted into anger, terror, uncertainty, sadness, and incredulity that something like this has happened. As she learns more pieces of the evening, including who knew what and when, she begins to uncover a new feeling—one of betrayal.

The majority of the book flips between then and now, sharing what happened when everything bad originally occurred and the present day, when Amy is trying, quite often unsuccessfully, to hold together the pieces of her life. She moved far away to attend college, but she feels—and rightfully so—as though she can never escape her past. However, she also learns that there are people who are there for her in ways she didn’t quite expect, allowing her to grow stronger than she’s been in a long time.

Amy discovers that there are people out there in the world who hide behind masks and get away with too much just because of who they are and how they behave in public, but she also learns that she can be strong herself, despite the predicaments she has been thrust into without her knowledge. Becky Jones has written a compelling, sensitive, realistic story about the dangers that technology and social media can pose, and how much mental pain can truly hurt.