Nineteen-year-old Libby Lawrence is good at pretending. Problem is, she’s not entirely sure how to stop. Which is good for her role in the campus production of Much Ado About Nothing … but poses problems in her personal life. Especially when the list of things she can’t admit to, even to her best friend Ella, starts to build. Losing her virginity to the too-charming director of her uni theatre group (just before he ran off with the group’s money) is only the start. There’s also an uncomfortable encounter with her broody on-stage love interest Roarke, and her crackling offstage chemistry with nerdy-but-sweet new director Will. And while Libby is thrilled to finally be on the inside of the uni theatre group she reveres, there’s a downside to being in on all the group chats, drama and backstage gossip. She must discover who she wants to be, who she wants to be with … and how to stop pretending. Jodi McAlister’s sparkling campus novel is a rom-com about friendship, authenticity, and all the ways we perform ourselves … and the preciousness of those moments when all artifice falls away. Dramatic and wise, it combines the arch wit and sharp banter of Ten Things I Hate About You and Clueless with a knowing heart.
Author
**Want to dip your toes into the Valentine universe? Try the free short story Galentine, set a year and a bit before the events of Valentine. http://jodimcalister.com.au/galentine/ ** Jodi is the author of the Valentine series, a young adult paranormal romance/urban fantasy series about smart girls, small towns, and scary fairies. There are three books in the series available: Valentine (2017), Ironheart (2018), and Misrule (2019), all published by Penguin Teen Australia. If Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Holly Black sounds like something you’d be into, these are the books for you. Jodi is originally from Kiama, a seaside holiday town on the south coast of New South Wales, and has lived in a bunch of different cities: Canberra (where she did her undergrad degrees), Wollongong (where she lived while she did her PhD in Sydney), and Hobart (where she held her first academic job) among them. Currently, she lives in Melbourne, where she works as a Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. When she’s not writing about clever girls and cunning fairies, Jodi is an academic. Her research focuses on representations of love in popular culture and fiction. It means that reading romance novels and watching (and let’s be real, writing huge amounts about) The Bachelor/ette is technically work for her. You can find Jodi on Twitter at @JodiMcA, where she tweets regularly about her research, her writing, cool things she finds interesting, her hero worship of Kate Bush, and her slightly-too-intense passion for The Bold and the Beautiful. (She’s not joking about that last one. In 2015, she got invited to visit the set of The Bold and the Beautiful, and it was the best thing that has ever happened to her in her entire life.)
