Willamette High

Seventeen-year-old Grey Evans loves her job cleaning cages each morning at the pet shop before school. She loves 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. And she loves her flirtatious exchange of notes with a fellow employee she's never met. 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. How can Grey follow her mom's ever more isolating rules and have a senior year with friends, college applications, and a cute co-worker named Will? This Willamette High series novel about family, friendship, mental health, and dating will appeal to fans of authors Kathleen Glasgow and Erin Stewart.

Sixteen-year-old Alice Carroll is a self-illustrated girl. Always ready with her pen, she grieves her mother's death, hates her father for abandoning her, resents her grandmother's low expectations and armors herself with ink before entering a new high school after moving to a privileged neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her entry into that La La Land of sculptured landscaping and SUVs is complicated by her summer flirtation with Matthew, a college boy who comes by her work at Comikaze Coffee, a coffee and comics shop, to walk her home most nights. The flirtation becomes more the night before she starts at her new school and he goes away to college, with Alice's expectations of a relationship low. She's had too many losses to believe that anyone stays. More losses than anyone knows. When Alice's father reappears and wants to see her, she's shocked that he expects her to welcome him back, the man driving the car that killed her mother. Or that her grandmother, Birdie, would let him come, since she's no fan of her father's. Furious, Alice reaches out to Matthew, who suggests she come to see him at college. When things fall apart, Alice vows to never forget that no one ever stays and draws her feelings on her skin to keep herself safe, and others at a distance. But some people ignore the warnings, finding a way to get inside Alice's illustrated walls, and she's torn between trusting in friendship and holding on tight to grief.

Haven Alexander is the whole package: co-captain of Cross Country, excelling at school, volunteering at church, loving and supporting her neurodiverse older brother, Paul, and being-according to her friend (and kind-of crush) Alice-a babe. Albeit a fresh-faced, basketball shorts and flip flops wearing babe who could carry someone out of a burning building no prob'. She's never given her parents a moment's anxiety, except for her stubborn refusal to date the boy of their dreams. And riding the motorcycle of hers. Until unapologetically bold Daisy King, The Derby Queen, hip checks Haven off the treadmill of her parents' sky-high expectations and into a life that includes kitchen kisses, confiscated cell phones, detentions, suspensions, and a posse of friends who embrace Paul. Who has his own parental expectations to deal with... Can Haven stop being everybody's haven but her own in this third Willamette High novel about community, coming of age, coming out, and coming to terms with being human?