Gilmore Girls meets Wuthering Heights in Mary O’Connell’s whip-smart, poignant, modern-day take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel

For seventeen-year-old Flannery Fields, the only respite from the plaid-skirted mean girls at Sacred Heart High School is her beloved teacher Miss Sweeney’s AP English class. But when Miss Sweeney doesn’t show up to teach Flannery’s favorite book, Wuthering Heights, leaving behind her purse, Flannery knows something is wrong.

The police are called, and Flannery gives them everything—except Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. This she holds onto. And good thing she does, because when she opens it, it has somehow transformed into Miss Sweeney’s real-time diary. It seems Miss Sweeney is in New York City—and she’s in trouble.

So Flannery does something very unFlannery-like: she skips school and sets out for Manhattan, with the book as her guide. But as soon as she arrives, she meets a boy named Heath. Heath is British, on a gap year, incredibly smart—yet he’s never heard of Albert Einstein or Anne Frank. In fact, Flannery can’t help thinking that he seems to have stepped from the pages of Brontë’s novel. Could it be that Flannery is spending this topsy-turvy day with her ultimate fictional romantic hero, Heathcliff, reborn in the twenty-first century?

 

Mary O’Connell is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the author of the short story collection Living with Saints and the YA novel The Sharp Time. She is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She lives with her husband and her three children in Lawrence, Kansas.

 

“Candy for the literary soul; give this title to strong readers and classics lovers.”—School Library Journal

“Fans of Rory Gilmore will love Flannery Fields and Dear Reader. Full of catty private school girls, mystery and boys who make your heart ache, this book has something for everyone.” —RT Book Reviews

“Weird and wonderful . . . a story for anyone who believes in the power of books to help you figure out your life and remind you to go out and live it.” —BookRiot

“I loved Dear Reader—the wild romance of it, the joy in the language, and the celebration of the imagination that the whole book is. It’s like a book dipped in love, and I can’t think of another quite like it.” —Alison Umminger, critically acclaimed author of American Girls

“Dear Reader breaks the YA genre wide open. Captivating, intelligent, and exquisitely written.” —Wendy Lawless, New York Times bestselling author of Chanel Bonfire

“Imaginative, fresh, and sometimes wickedly funny, and a book with real compassion at its core. I loved everything about it.” —Laura Moriarty, New York Times bestselling author of The Chaperone

“Dear Reader is relentlessly beautiful. I am broken-hearted that these characters aren’t my real-life friends.” —Katrina Leno, author of The Half Life of Molly Pierce and The Lost & Found