Effortless with You by Lizzy Charles is about a girl named Lucy. Lucy is a fun and dynamic character that your sure to fall in love with. Lucy's story revolves around her relationships with the different people in her life. Lucy is with a guy that mistreats her and she does not yet realize that she deserves better. Lucy is also constantly taken advantage of by her friend and makes poor decisions because of her! As a result, Lucy gets bad grades and gets into a fight yet again with her parents who cant understand why she is acting the way she is. They send Lucy to work over the summer which is where she meets Justin who changes her life forever. I loved this book and i love how it focused on different parts of Lucy's life! This book teaches a great lesson about getting in with the right crowd and hanging out with the right people. This book was a cute and heart warming young adult novel that i would recommend to anyone looking for a short read. ( )

How easy is it to develop self-confidence when your own mother has never really been able to give you anything? This is how Lucy has grown up. Her mother went into post-partum depression shortly after she was born and sixteen years later, there are still lingering effects. As a result, Lucy hasn't had that nurturing and special bond that often makes the difference between self-confidence and withdrawing when life becomes overwhelming. After discovering success as a freshman basketball player, she endured severe bullying by older, jealous players and it affected her so much, she quit and even started eating lunch in the janitor's closet.
Now, at sixteen, she thinks she's turned a few corners. She has a glitzy best friend, Marissa, who took her on as a rehab project, and a hot boyfriend, Zach. Unfortunately, Marissa is really a self-centered manipulator who sees her more as a toy she can twist and turn, while Zach is a horndog who spends most of their time together trying to get her to do things she's not ready for, or texting his soccer buddies. What Lucy desperately wants to believe is a cool social life, is really an failing attempt to fit in and be cared about.
When she sneaks out to go to a pool party with Marissa after being grounded, her mom shows up and not only embarrasses the heck out of her, but issues an ultimatum. Lucy will get a summer job to help her learn responsibility. Too bad Mom can't see just how hurting her daughter really is.
When she's picked up for her first day of work as a painter bu Justin, perhaps the hottest and most popular guy at her school, sparks fly and there's lots of snark between them. Lucy is sure he's smug, self-centered and shallow. Justin doesn't do much to change her mind at first, because he has reasons why he doesn't want her to know the real person behind his public image.
Working on his painting crew is more than interesting. Lucy faints because she's too stubborn to avoid dehydration, catches Marissa and Zach making out at the pool in the complex she's painting and falls from a ladder when Justin is too stubborn to get the crew to safety when a wild storm approaches.
As the summer progresses, she begins to realize a number of things. She's more her own person than she thought, Justin is a much nicer and more complex guy than she realized, her mom can't help being depressed and she misses basketball a heck of a lot more than she ever thought she could.
This started out feeling a bit cheesy, but quickly turned into a very absorbing read. Mature teens who have experienced confidence issues, betrayal, attraction to someone who turned out to be a lot more than meets the eye and those who have experienced family mental health issues will all like this book a lot. ( )

When I saw the cover and read the synopsis for Effortless with You, I thought it sounded like a cute YA contemporary romance, and it is, but I wasn't expecting just how much I really enjoyed it. It's finally summer. Lucy is looking forward to hanging out at the pool with her popular friend Marissa. She finally has a boyfriend, Zach, and things seem to be going good, well except for at home. When Lucy was a freshman in high school, she suffered some intense bullying because of her athletic ability and the fact that she was better than the senior girls. It was awful for her, and coupled with some "mom issues," her already low self-esteem hit rock bottom. Enter Marissa, who "saves" her and "transforms" her into the image that Marissa wants her to be, which isn't necessarily a good thing. After her grades dropped and she gets in trouble one too many times, Lucy finds herself with a job, arranged by her parents, for the entire summer. Who she wasn't expecting to find sitting behind the wheel of the truck she was picked up in for work was Justin, the most beautiful, cocky, popular, aggravating boy ever, with eyes that you could lose yourself in for days. While other girls swooned over him, Lucy was determined that wasn't going to be her. As the summer progresses and she and Justin get to know each other, she begins to see him for who he really is, and her heart begins to betray her. He's nothing like she thought he was, and that makes it even harder for her to know that they will never be anything more than friends. After all, he doesn't see her in that way, he has a girlfriend, and there is no way he would be interested in her, is there?

Effortless with You was a great YA romance. Though the plot is good, it isn't unique, but the character building was superb and really set this story apart from being just another cute YA romance. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Lucy's character grow and come of age. She dealt with some really hard, really tough things. She was naive about a lot of things, especially regarding Marissa, Marissa's motives, and her boyfriend, but she also came to possess a wisdom and strength by the end of the novel that were beyond her years. She has issues that are centered around her and her mom's mental status that go back to early childhood, which have deeply scarred her, and I was really touched as they worked through this over the course of the book (and it wasn't easy by any means). She met a really great group of guys, who she worked with, and I just loved them all, especially Alex. Then there was Justin - swoon - he was such an amazing guy. He could come off as a jerk, at least in Lucy's mind, but he was really great underneath. I just loved him. Their's is not a love at first sight relationship by any means, and it was really great watching them as they progressed from not getting along, to friendship, to even more. Lucinda didn't always handle things in the best way and messed up a lot, but she also grew tremendously. I was almost like watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Overall, this is a wonderful YA contemporary romance, and if you enjoy that type of story, then Effortless with You is something I most definitely recommend checking out. ( )