A heartbreaking debut YA romance featuring a neuroatypical girl with a tragic history and the chronically ill boy trying to break the vault encasing her heart.
Alvie Fitz doesn’t fit in, and she doesn’t care. She’s spent years swallowing meds and bad advice from doctors and social workers. Adjust, adapt. Pretend to be normal. It sounds so easy.
If she can make it to her eighteenth birthday without any major mishaps, she’ll be legally emancipated. Free. But if she fails, she’ll become a ward of the state and be sent back to the group home.
All she wants is to be left alone to spend time with her friend, Chance, the one-winged hawk at the zoo where she works. She can bide her time with him until her emancipation. Humans are overrated anyway.
Then she meets Stanley, a boy who might be even stranger than she is—a boy who walks with a cane, who turns up every day with a new injury, whose body seems as fragile as glass. Without even meaning to, she finds herself getting close to him. But Alvie remembers what happened to the last person she truly cared about.
Her past stalks her with every step, and it has sharp teeth. But if she can find the strength to face the enemy inside her, maybe she’ll have a chance at happiness after all.
What happens when two people who believe they’re broken find the one person who sees them as whole?
- Neurodivergent Romance: Features a fiercely independent, neuroatypical heroine, Alvie, who relates better to the one-winged hawk at the zoo than to other people.
- Outsiders Finding Love: She doesn’t want to let anyone in. He’s a boy named Stanley whose body is as fragile as glass. Together, they might not be so strange after all.
- Coming of Age Story: With her eighteenth birthday just around the corner, Alvie fights for her freedom against a system that wants to label her, all while navigating the terrifying world of first love.
- Mental Health Fiction: A raw and honest exploration of trauma, grief, and learning to trust when your past has sharp teeth and won’t let go.
