LOVE IS THE DRUG

Two students from an elite DC private school battle pandemic, political intrigue, and their own star-crossed love in this big, romantic thriller from the widely-acclaimed author of THE SUMMER PRINCE.

Emily Bird (or Bird, as she calls herself) is an overachieving, academically driven student, attending a prestigious private school in DC. Bird is entrenched in the concept of personas: the differences between her true self and her public self. Bird wants to be a perfect student to please her mother and her judgmental classmates, not to mention the omnipresent college admissions committees. Desperate for approval, Bird shuts away her true self. But when a terrorist attack unleashes a deadly global flu pandemic, Bird’s carefully cultivated world falls apart. She wakes up in a hospital room, desperate to piece together the truth of her last fractured memory—an exclusive party where everything went wrong.

Alaya Dawn Johnson fashions a harrowing tale of conspiracy and betrayal, wherein Bird must not only discover truths about herself, but about those she thought she trusted. Fans of THE SUMMER PRINCE will devour this brilliant, microcosmic take on the nature of pandemic, and the terrifying potential scenario that unfolds.

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of the adult paranormal novel MOONSHINE (St. Martins Griffin, Spring 2010) and its follow up WICKED CITY (Spring 2012). Her first YA novel, THE SUMMER PRINCE, received widespread praise, including being longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, named a Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Honor Winner, a selection as a “Great Summer Read for Teens” by NPR, and was an American Booksellers Association Winter Institute Buzz Book of 2013. Johnson graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures, and currently resides in New York City.