After reading today’s Free Fridays selection, The Ivy by Lauren Kunze and Rina Onur, you may actually be glad you didn’t get into Harvard.
This fun Young Adult novel, written by two friends who met at Harvard, follows the trials and travails of freshman Callie Andrews. She’s just arrived on campus, straight from California, and quickly finds that Cambridge brings a whole new set of challenges.
Anyone who’s made some school-age mistakes will sympathize with Callie’s string of bad luck—boy trouble, social miscues, getting on the wrong side of the school paper’s star reporter. But her three supportive roommates are a constant reminder that college—no matter how prestigious the school—is a time for making lifelong friends who help you forget those dumb decisions, and move on to the next challenge along the road to graduation.
Three more books in The Ivy series follow this adventure in higher learning.
Free Fridays Recommends
Each week, we ask our featured author to recommend a book or author that you may want to check out. Since authors are such passionate readers themselves, we thought you might like to find out what they love to read, too! Here’s what Lauren recommends:
Lately, as I work on a science fiction project of my own, I've been thinking a lot about my childhood favorite, Ender's Game: the story of a young genius chosen to attend an elite military academy and defend the world against imminent destruction. This is science fiction at its most accessible, and I would urge everyone—particularly young women who think they’re not necessarily fans of the genre—to pick it up and give it a try. I actually cracked the spine of my old copy: a form of unparalleled praise that can only result from countless rereading. Obviously, I’ve found much to admire in Ender over the years, but today the read feels particularly refreshing for its third-person narration: Card conveys Ender’s interior struggles and astounding empathy while at the same time firmly holding him hostage in the machinations of the adult, military world. So, no matter your age or attitude toward science fiction—and especially to teens weary of today’s ever-popular first-person narrators and love triangles—I can’t recommend this one enough!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search by author name to download this fun YA series.
