NANTUCKET BLUE

BY LEILA HOWLAND
HYPERION TEENS

For Cricket Thompson, a summer like this one will change everything. A summer spent on Nantucket with her best friend, Jules Clayton, and the indomitable Clayton family. A summer when she'll make the almost unattainable Jay Logan hers. A summer to surpass all dreams. Some of this turns out to be true. Some of it doesn't. When Jules and her family suffer a devastating tragedy that forces the girls apart, Jules becomes a stranger whom Cricket wonders whether she ever really knew. And instead of lying on the beach working on her caramel-colored tan, Cricket is making beds and cleaning bathrooms to support herself in paradise for the summer. But it's the things Cricket hadn't counted on--most of all, falling hard for someone who should be completely off-limits--that turn her dreams into an exhilarating, bittersweet reality. A beautiful future is within her grasp, and Cricket must find the grace to embrace it. If she does, her life could be the perfect shade of Nantucket blue.

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Quick Facts:
A graduate of Georgetown University, Leila Howland spent five years acting in New York in everything from an MTV public service announcement for safe sex to a John Guare play at Lincoln Center and was a proud company member of the award-winning Flea Theater in Tribeca. Currently, she teaches high school English and English as a second language in downtown Los Angeles and occasionally moonlights as an extra on the Young and the Restless. This is her first novel.

Celebrity Lookalike: Combo of Emma Watson and Gidget (Sally Field)
Motto: "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." Annie Dillard
5 Must Reads:
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
The one thing your author can’t live without: My bathtub, it's where I do my best thinking!