Renegade

August 2017

Dear Miss Catherine,

Let me tell you what it's REALLY like in a top-tier Ivy League. Raise both the black and white flags over Shakespeare's Globe Theater because my life is a tragic comedy.

...Rah, rah-ah-ah-ah
Roma, roma-ma...

Bookish perpetual outsider Ari escapes small-town Appleton for Excelsior, an ivy-covered, ivory-towered university in the heart of a big city. With her old dreams of showing at Paris Fashion Week temporarily on hold, she tries to MAKE IT in a strange, new, insane setting. Juggling schoolwork and the perils of social life while stuffed into a blazer and matching pencil skirt for job recruiting, she joins the horde of all the other good little Machiavellian, pre-professional snakes trying to slither their way into a name-brand, front-office finance job on Wall Street.

A modern-day Ulysses with the coming-of-age heart of Perks of Being a Wallflower and colorful humor of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Renegade depicts the full, bittersweet hugeness of life, exploring sonder and sociopolitical concerns through all three POVs, both past and present tense, sparsely narrated, rapid-fire, play-like dialogue, and the letters from a fellow human being of ambiguous identity.