ANATOMY OF A MISFIT

Contemporary YA with an edgy twist, a la Gingerbread or The Perks of Being a Wallflower, from a YA debut author.

Outside, Anika Dragomir is all lip gloss and blond hair-the third most popular girl in school. Inside, she is a freak. A mix of dark thoughts, diabolical plots, and, if local chatter is to be believed, vampire DNA. After all, her father is from Romania. Everyone else in Nebraska is about as American as an apple pie, wrapped in a flag, on the Fourth of July. Spider stew. That is what Anika is made of. But she keeps it under wraps to maintain her social position. One step out of line and Becky Vilhauser, first most popular girl in school, will make her life a living hell.

So when former loner Logan McDonough shows up one September hotter, smarter, and more mysterious than ever, Anika knows she cannot get involved. It would be insane to throw away her social safety for a nerd. So what if that nerd is now a black-leather-jacket- wearing dreamboat, and his loner status is clearly the result of his troubled home life? Who cares if the right girl could help him with all that, maybe even save him from it? Logan. Who needs him when Jared Kline, the bad boy every girl dreams of, is asking her on dates?

Andrea Portes’s emotionally devastating debut YA novel lays bare the futility in pretending to be something we are not and the value in finally celebrating all that we are - inside.

Andrea Portes is the bestselling novelist of the critically lauded adult novel, Hick. The book was her debut and has since been made into a feature film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Blake Lively, Eddie Redmayne, and Juliette Lewis. Bury This, her second novel, was published in January 2014 by Soft Skull Press. Anatomy of a Misfit is her third novel, and her first for young adult readers.