For some reason, Sarra Manning has been flying under the cat's radar for years... Her2004sophomore book Diary of a Crush 1: French Kiss has been in our library for a while now, it gets checked out regularly, but for superficial reasons, the cat never felt like reading it (1. Title of the book is off-putting, and 2. The cover doesn't promise a whole lot of good...). Then suddenly not one, but 2 Sarra Manning books kept on being recommended, and the cat is starting to get the feeling she's made a mistake the size of the whole Sarah Dessen debacle... 
 Let's Get Lost was published after the Diary of a Crush trilogy. In it we follow 16-year-old Isabel Clark who's feared at her school for being your typical Mean Girl. She doesn't have friends either, but she's got a gang of (not so faithful) minions, who she has to keep in check. It's a girl eat girl world at high school, and after being bullied when she was younger, Isabel is not going to let herself be the victim again, especially not now that her mother has died. One evening at a party she meets 20-year-old college student Smith - like her also named after a character in a book and attending the Uni where Isabel's father teaches - and hooks up with him. She convinces him she's older, a lie which is (of course) going to catch up with her later on. 
 Even if the story of Let's Get Lost isn't the most original of stories and even though the protagonists are very reminiscent of other protagonists in books of this genre (contemporary YA romance), Sarra Manning's take on it sounds fresher than e.g. in a book like Kody Keplinger's The DUFF. There's a case to be made for the fact that Isabel is also just escaping the reality of her world (not coping with her mother's death, dysfunctional relationship with her father) and using Smith in the way that Bianca was using Wesley. But the interactions between Isabel and Smith on the one hand, and Isabel and e.g. Smith's friends on the other hand, read more like the interactions between Sarah Dessen characters than anything the cat has read in a while. And even though Sarra Manning's protagonists are sexually a lot bolder than Dessen's for sure (but clearly not as bold as Keplinger's!), the similarities lie in the situation the protagonists finds herself in: she's caught up in a web of her own lies, and has to find a way out of it in order to work through her problems. And that is something she clearly needs to do before she can move on with her life. 
 Another reason for the freshness is the very distinct British setting. Sarra Manning is British, and the school setting, the going out scene, etc. all of that is clearly British and this is including the sexual boldness, the drinking and the smoking, which is always just a tad more matter-of-fact than many American contemporary YA romance novels. Teen angst is clearly something universal, but there are obvious (geographical, in this case) variations, and Sarra Manning is a good case in point for readers who like their Sarah Dessen and Caroline Mackler but want to try something more errr... edgy? Also, Sarra Manning's language feels authentic, unforced (and non-amateurish) and all of this makes for a very enjoyable reading experience. 
 Once again, here's a book that's proof that you should never judge an author by a single book cover. Let's Get Lost is a fresh take on an almost beaten down YA genre. I know that Sarra Manning has a ton of other books, and who knows, the cat may even give Diary of a Crush 1: French Kiss a try...