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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
July 2011
On Sale: July 5, 2011
320 pages
ISBN: 0307592790
EAN: 9780307592798
Hardcover
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Fiction
From the widely praised author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy, a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest. In The Gap Year, told with perfect pitch from both points of view, we meet Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant extraordinaire, a divorcΓ©e still secretly carrying a torch for the ex who dumped her, a suburban misfit whoβs given up her rebel dreams so her only child can get a good education. We also learn the secrets of Aubrey Lightsey, tired of being the dutiful, grade-grubbing band geek, ready to explode from wanting her βrealβ life to begin, trying to figure out love with boys weaned on Internet porn. When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idolβsex god with a dangerous past, the fuse is lit. Late-bloomer Aubrey metastasizes into Camβs worst silent, sullen teen nightmare, a girl with zero interest in college. Worse, on the sly Aubreyβs in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join a celebrity-ridden nutball cult. As the novel unfoldsβwith humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and penetrating insights about love in the twenty-first centuryβthe dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision . . .
 Media BuzzOn Point - June 21, 2011
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