On top of all that, it’s so, so smart about pop culture and genre. It’s a story about a girl realizing that she’s in love with her best friend, but it’s also about how the impulse to protect your own heart can lead to preemptively cutting it right out of your own chest. It’s about close friends on the cusp of heading out into the world in different directions, and it’s clear-eyed about the likelihood of those friendships and relationships surviving the college years. It’s about imposter syndrome as experienced by creatives, and it’s about imposter syndrome in terms of cultural and ethnic and familial identity. It’s about people using other people as tools, rather than interacting with them as fellow human beings. It’s a story about a girl who finds joy in creation through writing, but it’s also about how easily that joy can turn into anxiety, obsession, self-doubt, and depression. Three months to cram in enough life experience to bring her writing up to Nadiya’s standards three months to bring up her grade three months to maybe, hopefully, get accepted into her first-choice college, to take the first step on the journey that she’s dreamed of for so long.Īs in Noteworthy, Redgate takes a familiar story arc-in this case, a teenage girl squashing years-worth of living into a few short months-and tells it in a way that makes it feel original, fresh, nuanced, emotionally honest, and entirely specific to her heroine and entire cast of characters. Nadiya thinks that Laila’s writing is such crap-based on trope and archetype and cliché rather than life experience and an understanding of humanity-that she torpedoes not only Laila’s dreams for the future, but her GPA, and with it, her hope to get pulled off the waitlist at Bowdoin.

And Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nadiya Nazarenko thinks that Laila’s writing is, in a word, crap. When he ends up in the hospital just a few months before graduation, he’s replaced by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nadiya Nazarenko. And her creative writing teacher thinks she has what it takes to do just that.

Someday, high school senior Laila Piedra wants to tell stories that transport people to other worlds, that inspire them to think and discuss and speculate and dream-she wants to do for other people what her favorite writers and show creators have done for her.

It felt furious and heated, humiliated and childish, as if physicality were a language she was supposed to have learned, and here she was in senior year, surrounded by a horde of native speakers, unable to translate the most basic concepts. Her inexperience didn’t feel charming or virtuous, like she was some good-girl persona from a movie.

Final draft riley redgate