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About The Gap Year
- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (July 5, 2011)
From the widely praised author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy, a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest.
In The Gap Year, told with perfect pitch from both points of view, we meet Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant extraordinaire, a divorcée still secretly carrying a torch for the ex who dumped her, a suburban misfit who’s given up her rebel dreams so her only child can get a good education.
We also learn the secrets of Aubrey Lightsey, tired of being the dutiful, grade-grubbing band geek, ready to explode from wanting her “real” life to begin, trying to figure out love with boys weaned on Internet porn.
When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idol–sex god with a dangerous past, the fuse is lit. Late-bloomer Aubrey metastasizes into Cam’s worst silent, sullen teen nightmare, a girl with zero interest in college. Worse, on the sly Aubrey’s in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join a celebrity-ridden nutball cult.
As the novel unfolds—with humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and penetrating insights about love in the twenty-first century—the dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision . . .
The Gap Year is featured in Good Housekeeping’s Summer Beach Reads 2011 and Yahoo’s 10 Best Books for Summer!
Praise for The Gap Year:
“… teases out the ever-deepening mysteries of parents and children as they grow up and apart. … spot-on observations of contemporary family life give this headlong story a fizzy energy that carries through to the unexpected conclusion.” –Publishers Weekly Review
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“Writing so sharp, smart, funny, and addictive, it’’s as if Molly Ivins had gven birth to a novelist.”” – ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (ZZ Packer is one of The New Yorker ‘s “20 under 40” and one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta)
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About Sarah Bird
Sarah Bird is the author of seven previous novels. She is a columnist for Texas Monthly and has contributed to many other magazines including O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Magazine; Real Simple; and Good Housekeeping. Sarah, the 2010 Johnston Dobie Paisano Fellow, makes her empty nest in Austin, Texas.
Connect with Sarah on her website, www.sarahbirdbooks.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
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Sarah Bird’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, August 1st: Raging Bibliomania
Tuesday, August 2nd: The Singleton in the Kitchen
Wednesday, August 3rd: Lit and Life
Thursday, August 4th: Suko’s Notebook
Monday, August 8th: Lakeside Musings
Tuesday, August 9th: My Random Acts of Reading
Wednesday, August 10th: She is Too Fond of Books – (Spotlight on Bookstores guest post)
Thursday, August 11th: Life in Review
Monday, August 15th: Juggling Life
Wednesday, August 17th: Books Distilled
Friday, August 19th: BookNAround
Monday, August 22nd: A Musing Reviews
Thursday, August 25th: girlichef