North Carolina native and author reads the obituaries in The 瓜神app & Observer every day. Over the last few years she noticed more young people showing up in those pages with no explanations about the cause of death.
She realized these were the hidden stories about the 鈥� and they became the inspiration for her latest young adult novel, 鈥溾�� (Balzer + Bray/2019). The protagonist, Emma Saylor, was 11 when her mother died of an opioid overdose. Now, she is a teenager spending the summer with her mother鈥檚 family and learning about a new side of her family 鈥� and herself.
Guest host Anita Rao talks to Dessen about her latest novel, how the young adult genre has changed over the last two decades and about Emma Saylor鈥檚 crisis of identity.
