When Claire Draper's fictional love story goes viral in the wake of a pandemic, the line between reality and fiction is blurred. But will she be able to tell the difference?
Claire is a junior in high school when a worldwide pandemic strikes, and she's in the epicenter of it all in New York City. Suddenly, Claire is forced to isolate with her family indefinitely, which means she won't be able to see her friends or even her girlfriend, Vanessa, in person for a long time.
At first it's not so bad, but the longer the pandemic lasts, the more Claire feels her priorities changing. That's when she looks outside her bedroom window and notices something new: A girl who lives in the building across the street sitting on her fire escape.
So Claire starts writing a story online about a girl who falls for the girl across the street. To Claire's surprise, the story goes viral-and it seems people think it's true. But how true is true? And what if Vanessa finds out? Will Claire be able to manage her newfound internet fame before everything spirals out of control?
Ok, I admit it. The ending of this surprised me! It wasn't going where I thought it was at all.
The pandemic has had a huge effect on everything, everywhere. No one can possibly argue with that. And there are as many ways of reacting to it as there are people caught up in it. This book shows a few of them, and beautifully, it treats them all as equally valid. Although people don't understand each other's coping mechanisms, they allow each other to have them. There's even a certain amount of (gasp) talking things out!
It seemed to me that Claire had an anxiety disorder, but maybe I'm just reading into that since a lot of MCs do now. Maybe she was just overwhelmed by the pandemic, as so many are and continue to be. Vanessa felt a bit overwhelming, but she seemed to work really well with Claire, so that worked out nicely. Claire's parents obviously meant well, even though it didn't always come across, and they came through in the end.
There's one day when Claire wakes up and everything is just *wrong* and I felt that was so relatable! In my house we call that 'not right in our skin' and it just seems to happen every so often. It was great to see that we're not the only ones!
I really enjoyed this, even though it was tough in places. It's a fantastic record of this really strange time and hopefully, in a few years when this is all forgotten, this will be a great way to explain it!
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