Slingshot
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
Acidly funny and compulsively readable, Mercedes Helnwein’s debut novel Slingshot is a story about two people finding each other and then screwing it all up. See also: soulmate, friendship, stupidity, sex, bad poetry, and all the indignities of being in love for the first time.
Grace Welles had resigned herself to the particular loneliness of being fifteen and stuck at a third-tier boarding school in the swamps of Florida, when she accidentally saves the new kid in her class from being beaten up. With a single aim of a slingshot, the monotonous mathematics of her life are obliterated forever…because now there is a boy in it that she never asked for. Wade Scholfield.
With Wade, Grace discovers a new way to exist. School rules are optional, life is bizarrely perfect, and conversations about wormholes can lead to make-out sessions that disrupt any logical stream of thought.
So why does Grace crush Wade’s heart into a million tiny pieces? And what are her options when she finally realizes that 1. The universe doesn’t revolve around her, and 2. Wade has been hiding a dark secret? Is Grace the only person unhinged enough to save him?
Eleanor and Park meets Ladybird in this outstanding debut novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dark-haired, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned Floridian sophomore Grace Welles, almost 16, is certain that her biology teacher, Mr. Sorrentino, is her soul mate, even though he's both 20 years her senior and engaged. Firmly rejected by Mr. Sorrentino and subsequently disillusioned, heartbroken Gracie returns from holiday break to her "almost-but-not-quite-prestigious preparatory boarding school," Midhurst. There, she can nearly forget her lovelorn 34-year-old mother, whom Gracie calls "delusional," and her older absent father in Beverly Hills, for whom Gracie and her mother are a second, secret family. When she rescues new student Wade Scholfield from senior bullies using her childhood slingshot, her prickly loner life is upended. In patient, dark blue–eyed skateboarder Wade, Gracie finds a true friend who accepts her flaws—but, as their friendship gives way to mutual attraction, she soon falls into the chaos of love and lust. Through a contemporary narrative that feels curiously grounded in the 1990s, Helnwein frankly conveys the joy, fear, and awkwardness of an all-consuming first love, poignantly depicting Gracie's growth: particularly the hard-won knowledge that she can exist "just by the sheer force of herself," and the grace she learns to show herself and others. Ages 13–up.
