About this item
Atypical meets Every Last Word in this relatable and heartfelt coming of age story about a neurodivergent teen navigating school, friendships and first love. Evvie Chambers is doing her best to skate through the last month of high school to graduation. The only thing standing in her way is a biology report on foxes - and her teacher, Mrs. Audrey Dearborn. The same Mrs. Dearborn who's been a thorn in Evvie's side for years, refusing to acknowledge or accommodate her neurodiversity. Evvie would much rather be doing her report on Aretha, the octopus she cares for when she volunteers at the Minnesota Zoo but deviating from the exact assignment isn't allowed - and Mrs. Dearborn isn't going to make following the rules easy. Evvie's only escape from high school hell is the Lair: a safe haven for kids whose brains need some time away.
About the Author
According to geographers, the American West begins at the 100th longitudinal meridian. Thanks to the fact that this meridian is the main street of her hometown in Nebraska, Kirstin Cronn-Mills grew up six blocks east of the West. Yes, there were cowboys around.Kirstin is a self-proclaimed word nerd. She learned to read when she was three (according to her mother) and she hasn't stopped since. Her grandmother and her father passed on their love of language to her, and that love became a love affair when she started writing poems in the sixth grade. She still writes poems, but now she focuses on young adult novels. She's pretty sure that teenagers are the funniest, smartest, coolest people on the planet.In 1992 Kirstin moved from Nebraska to southern Minnesota, where she lives now. She writes a lot, reads as much as she can, teaches at a two-year college, and goofs around with her son, Shae, and her husband, Dan. Her first novel, The Sky Always Hears Me and The Hills Don't Mind (Flux) , was a 2010 Minnesota Book Award finalist in Young People's Literature. A short story epilogue to Sky, "The First Time I Got Stranded in the Big Empty," appears in the e-anthology The First Time (Verday and Stapleton, 2011) . She also published a middle-grade science book in 2009: Collapse! The Science of Structural Engineering Failures (Compass Point Books) . Her short story "Header" will appear on the Young Adult Review Network (YARN) website sometime in the fall of 2012, and a nonfiction book about the lives of transgendered Americans will appear from Lerner in 2014
