“Smart and funny, with characters so real and vulnerable, you want to send them care packages. I loved this book.” —Rainbow Rowell
From debut author Mary H.K. Choi comes a compulsively readable novel that shows young love in all its awkward glory—perfect for fans of Eleanor & Park and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
For Penny Lee, high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she’d somehow landed a boyfriend, they never managed to know much about each other. Now Penny is heading to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer. It’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.
Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.
When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to, you know, see each other.
In no time, college Penny would be as adored as Celeste. Granted, she'd have to get a lobotmy to keep it up, but maybe the exchange rate was worth it.
Not that she was ugly. She simply had one of those faces where the features were crowded into the middle like a too-big room with tiny furniture.
That night Penny read Maus twice and cried. She knew then that she had to become a writer.
Instead she'd spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.
People were odd. Sam loved and loathed that about them. Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.
He'd called her under the guise of being some knight in shining armor, and then, yeah, he'd barfed on her.
As if her text bubbles had spent a late night in a speakeasy.
