Tommy Wallach, the New York Times bestselling author of the stunning debut (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) We All Looked Up, delivers a brilliant new novel about a young man who overcomes a crippling loss and finds the courage to live after meeting an enigmatic girl. Was this story written about me? I shrugged. Yes or no? I shrugged again, finally earning a little scowl, which somehow made the girl even more pretty. It s very rude not to answer simple questions, she said.I gestured for my journal, but she still wouldn t give it to me. So I took out my pen and wrote on my palm. I can t, I wrote. Then, in tiny letters below it: Now don t you feel like a jerk? Parker Sant hasn t spoken a word in five years. While his classmates plan for bright futures, he skips school to hang out in hotels, killing time by watching the guests. But when he meets a silver-haired girl named Zelda Toth, a girl who claims to be quite a bit older than she looks, he ll discover there just might be a few things left worth living for. From the celebrated author of We All Looked Up comes a unique story of first and last loves.
We all spend our lives as the rope in a game of tug-of-war. On one side, you’ve got the weight of the unchangeable past pulling at you, and on the other, you’ve got the unpredictable future. If you’re lucky, you stay balanced right in the middle. But if you’re unlucky (and I think most of us are, some of the time anyway), you end up falling over one way or the other.
