Slingshot
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Helnwein debuts in striking fashion... The writing, especially the dialogue, is magnetic, honest, and brimming with caustic wit... [an] enrapturing take on the intense highs and lows of teenage love." —Booklist (Starred Review)
"Wildly real and bursting with all the romance and pain of coming into oneself." —Kirkus (Starred Review)
"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." —Publishers Weekly
"One of Eight 2021 YA Books To TBR ASAP" —BookRiot
Mercedes Helnwein's Slingshot is an exciting debut contemporary young adult novel perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Mary H. K. Choi
"I didn’t think it was going to be anything like this when I finally fell in love. I thought it was going to be pretty simple. Like, I’d love someone and they’d love me. I thought that’s the way it worked.”
Grace Welles is stuck at a third-tier boarding school in the swamps of Florida, where her method of survival is a strict, self-imposed loneliness. And it works. Her crap attitude keeps people away because without friends, there are fewer to lose.
But when she accidentally saves the new kid, Wade Scholfield, from being beaten up, everything about her precariously balanced loner world collapses and, in order to find her footing again, she has no choice but to discover a completely new way to exist.
Because with Wade around, school rules are optional, weird is okay, and conversations about wormholes can lead to make-out sessions that disrupt any logical stream of thought. Nothing’s perfect, but that’s not the point. When they're together everything seems uncomplicated in a way that Grace knows is not possible.
Except it is.
So why does Grace crush Wade’s heart into a million pieces?
Acidly funny and compulsive readable, this debut is a story about two people finding each other and then screwing it all up. See also: soulmate, stupidity, sex, friendship, bad poetry, very bad decisions and all the indignities of being in love for the first time.
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.
