Reynolds' book teaches young adults about morality and responsibility. The characters she creates seem real and their emotions convincing because many teens understand the crises these characters face and they need to read about ways of dealing with them. Reynolds incorporates information on personal and social responsibility into the text without seeming preachy.

She makes us realize the difficulties of teen pressures and the likelihood of falling into difficult traps. It is all too easy, Reynolds recognizes, to feel trapped by crisis situations and to start defining yourself as a loser.

Teenagers who find themselves in these situations often feel that they have to fight stereotypes. Reynolds helps her teenager readers (as well as Jason himself) understand that Jason is not a loser because he has been on a losing track for a while, and she helps them understand that Christina and Melissa are not unable...