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My Life in Letters by EMMcNulty
EMMcNulty
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Cover by the amazing @LNRoberts1 It's 1983 and high school sophomore, Anne Kelly's home life is coming apart at the seams. What's more, her friends are hanging with the popular crowd, and Anne doesn't feel she fits in. She gradually becomes fixated with a shy junior on the swim team named Gavin Maloney, but her friends think he's a total loser. However, Anne only becomes more interested in Gavin, and she decides to take a prank her friends played on him a step further. She begins writing him letters, not the stupid anonymous notes her friends put in his locker to taunt him, but real letters. Gavin has lost his mom to cancer and his father has gone missing. He now lives with his grandfather who is in a deteriorating state of Alzheimer's disease. It's a secret that Gavin must keep. Nobody can know or they will separate Gavin from his grandfather and put them both in state run homes. Gavin's plan is to stay invisible. Once he turns 18, he'll be a legal adult and nobody will be able to separate him from his grandfather. He just has to hold out one more year. But it isn't easy. Everyone needs friends, and now this Anne girl has singled him out. Part of him aches for human contact, and he's not immune to her quirky sense of humor, but she might be totally insane. She's practically stalking him, and if he befriends her, she might find out about his grandfather and ruin his plan. But what if he just wrote her back?
Love Me or Leave Me by EMMcNulty
EMMcNulty
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Cover art by @LNRoberts1 College student, Aveen Sullivan, has a huge crush on the strapping rugby player, Jamal Jean-Pierre. They meet at a college dorm party the last week of her freshman year, and she's certain he likes her too. He's flirty and fun, and at the end of the night, he asks for her phone number. You don't do that if you're not interested, right? But after Aveen goes home for her summer break, she never hears back from Jamal. And to make matters worse, he turns up on her radar again, when her best friend, Jenna, texts her that she's dating a new guy from her summer internship, and his name is Jamal Jean-Pierre! With the new semester just starting, Aveen must now pretend that she isn't bothered by seeing her crush and her best friend together, but Jamal keeps popping up everywhere: in her History class, at her part-time job, in the cafeteria, and pretty much everywhere else. And unless she's reading things the wrong way, he still seems to be flirting with her. Confused and wondering whether Jamal is just a rake, Aveen makes a concerted effort to move on. However, when Jenna and Jamal talk Aveen into helping them prepare for a TV game show with a trip for two to Miami as the Grand Prize, Aveen has had enough. But Jenna and Jamal won't take no for an answer. Instead, they insist on setting Aveen up with their mutual friend Fred, so that Aveen and Fred can compete as well. It turns out that Fred has an interesting secret, but he's up for a free trip to Miami, so he agrees to fake date Aveen to see if they can win. But there's something else that Fred knows, and it's about Jamal's true feelings for Aveen and a family tragedy that has left him heartbroken and fragile. This new information changes everything, and Aveen has to decide what to do. Should she trust her instincts, pursue Jamal, and risk losing her best friend, or should she move on and quietly try to mend her broken heart?