PUSHING PERFECT

A girl’s quest for perfection results in dangerous consequences in this smart, suspenseful YA novel by the author of Playlist for the Dead.

How far would you go to be perfect? Kara has the perfect life. She gets perfect grades. She has perfect skin. She never messes up. Until now. Because perfection is an illusion, and Kara has been struggling to maintain it for as long as she can remember. With so much pressure to succeed, it is hard not to do whatever it takes.

But when Kara takes a new underground drug to help her ace the SATs, she does not expect to get a text from a blocked sender, telling her to follow a set of mysterious instructions – or risk her dark secret getting out. Suddenly, the one thing Kara thought would save her future is threatening to destroy it.

Soon, she finds herself part of a group of teens with secrets of their own, who are all under the thumb of the same anonymous texter. And if they do not find a way to stop the blackmailer, their perfect futures will go up in flames.

In the tradition of The Secret History and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, this book is layered and morally complex, a realistic exploration of a group of teens caught in the struggle between right and wrong while living up to the unrealistic expectations of a high pressure society.

Michelle Falkoff is the author of Playlist for the Dead. Her fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, DoubleTake, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently serves as Director of Communication and Legal Reasoning at Northwestern University School of Law. Visit her online at www.michellefalkoff.com.