Pet Shop Girl (Willamette High)

Pet Shop Girl (Willamette High)

Seventeen-year-old Grey Evans loves her job cleaning cages each morning at the pet shop before school: the parakeets hanging upside down from her hair, the mice with pinto pony patches and especially a baby guinea pig who trills and purrs when she’s nearby. Even though she’s convinced she’ll forget to change after work one day and get to school with feathers in her hair and bird crap on her back. Grey doesn’t love when her recently divorced mother has a panic attack that sends her to the emergency room or the pills her mom is prescribed, making her ricochet from controlling to raging to zombified in minutes. Grey walks the tightrope between following her mom’s ever more isolating rules and having a senior year with friends, college applications, and a cute co-worker named Will, in this Willamette High series novel about family and friendship, addiction and dating by the author of Alice in Black . Wrangling unruly animals in her chaotic pet store job pales by comparison to the stress Grey Evans has to deal with at home with her overmedicated, recently divorced, helicopter mom. Adding to her messy life are both drama with friends, and her burgeoning relationship with Will, a kind coworker. In her second YA novel, Bebe Duncan has crafted a sweet coming-of-age story that is both funny and affecting. Fans of Mary Amato and Kasie West will love this heartwarming tale, as will teen readers who grew up ardently playing with The Littlest Pet Shop, dreaming of playing with parakeets and guinea pigs all day long. -- Debby Dodds, author of Amish Guys Don't Call Bebe Duncan is the author of Contemporary Young Adult novels in the Willamette High series, ALICE IN BLACK and PET SHOP GIRL, set in Portland, Oregon. Her realistic fiction focuses on social and family issues that teen girls face, from a first-person perspective, and on developing characters with challenges that resonate with readers. Long a writer of narrative nonfiction, she was reintroduced to YA by her daughter, and the sense of immediacy, the emotions portrayed, and the action in that genre inspired her to start noveling stat. She lives in Portland with her family and two humongous goldfish named Richard and Blanche. When she's not immersed in nouns and verbs or reading aloud as she edits, she revels in crime shows, YA fiction, WNBA games on TV, and walking a zillion miles a day. You can visit her online at www.bebeduncan.com and on Instagram.