Prey Review

Prey 
by Lurlene McDaniel
From Goodreads:

A teacher is supposed to impart a love of learning and a thirst for knowledge. It’s a bit different with Ms. Lori Settles. All the kids are talking about how hot she is–and she is especially interested in Ryan Piccoli. When she starts giving Ryan extra attention, he’s feeling more than happy–at first. He’s used to being the class clown, but really he’s a loner. One day after school, the friendship with Lori Settles goes farther than he ever expected. She’s his teacher. She’s at least twice his age. Intimacy with a teacher is wrong, yet it feels so good in every way. Soon, Lori is making demands and Ryan begins to feel overwhelmed, but Ryan refuses to even admit anything is going on. Something immoral is going on and before too long the choices made will change lives forever.

My Thoughts: Really short read about a young boy who gets sexually involved with his teacher. Ryan's no Pacey from Dawson's Creek, and Lori is far more realistically portrayed as a predator than Pacey's teacher-lover. She likes her boys young, she's got a messed up history, and Ryan is much more a victim than he thinks. Ryan's friend Honey is your average teenager with a crush and she is by far the easiest person to deal with. I think the book could have been so much better had it explored some of the issues that it merely mentioned- in particular the double standard between adult men having sex with teen girls compared to adult women having sex with teen boys. There were things in the end that happened too quickly and easily, and most of the parents were portrayed as clueless when it came to their children's feelings and activities... but maybe that's more realistic than I'm giving credit to. Overall it was a fast paced book, and while there is lots of sex, most of it's "off screen" and not shown. Towards the end, more is learned about Ryan and Lori, but there's still much left unexplored. I thought the topic was interesting and completely relevant to today's society, I just wish it had been a little more fleshed out.  Honestly, I picked up this book simply because it was so different from Lurlene McDaniel's teens with cancer books that I read as a teen.


Prey gets a Midnight Book Rating of: