First published 2004
Cassie, Lydia, and Emily are students at Ashbury High, assigned to exchange letters with boys from Brookfield as part of a school pen pal project. Cassie is still raw from her father's death, and when her assigned pen pal Matthew turns out to be genuinely kind, she starts to trust him in ways she did not plan. Lydia gets paired with a boy named Charlie and the two of them fall into a sharp, funny back-and-forth that keeps escalating. Emily's pen pal, meanwhile, turns out to be hostile and strange, and what begins as an awkward correspondence tips into something that threatens all three girls. The story is told entirely through letters, notes, and journal entries, so the reader pieces together events from competing voices and partial information. Cassie's grief sits underneath everything, quiet and stubborn, shaping how she reads Matthew's letters and how much she lets herself believe in them. When things go wrong, the three girls stop waiting for adults to fix it and start making their own plans. The book is funny and then suddenly it is not, and that shift is the whole point.
Genres: fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, young-adult, mystery-thriller
Vibes: darkly-funny, emotional, intimate, introspective, suspenseful
Tropes: epistolary-narrative, found-family, slow-burn-trust, unreliable-information
Setting: Ashbury High, Brookfield
Period: contemporary
Content warnings: death, emotional-abuse