1. Congrats on your YA debut! How would you describe your book to readers?
Thank you so much! I like to think this book dips its toe into lots of juicy genres. There’s a little mystery, a little disaster novel, a taste of romance, a hefty dose of coming-of-age, and even speculative fiction. Something for everyone?

It takes place in a kind of alternate near future, with the first human mission to Mars about to take off. The disaster, of course, is a huge earthquake that hits San Francisco on the first page of the book. The mystery: Celeste’s best friend Nicky disappears on the day of the quake, but she knows he was already planning to run away. So is he still alive, or has she lost him forever?

They’re seniors in high school, so this all happens while they’re right on the cusp of leaving their childhoods behind. On her quest to find Nicky, Celeste meets a beguiling boy (enter the romance!) and discovers some truths about herself.

2. What drew you to YA to tell this story?
At first, when I had just the seed of the plot in mind and didn’t know much about it yet, I already knew it was going to be a friendship story at its heart. That made me want to write it for high school readers, because friends are everything in high school, right? Whether it’s just your one intense friendship, like Celeste and Nicky’s in the book, or your group of friends and those changing dynamics, or the whole high school social landscape, life for a lot of teens revolves around friendship, I think, with all its love and fun and sometimes pain and loss. Our high school friends help us figure out who we are, and I admire how so many YA authors explore this in gorgeous ways.

3. What, if anything, surprised you while writing it?
I don’t really write with an outline or much of a plan, honestly, so pretty much everything surprises me along the way. When I finish a chapter, it’s almost like, oh, so I guess we ended up here? Fun! Especially in the early stages. It’s like putting together a puzzle without the top of the box—sometimes frustrating, but so rewarding when it feels right. Sometimes it means a lot of revising later, but that’s okay because revising’s my favorite part.

In this book, I think what surprised me most was the Mars mission. I knew Celeste and Nicky were going to be space-obsessed, but I didn’t know where that would lead them and how big a role it would play in the story. The first draft didn’t have much Mars stuff in it at all, really, and then I got to go back and sprinkle in more and more in later versions.

4. Tell us more about the characters. Which character do you most identify with and why?
What I think is true of all three major characters—Celeste, Nicky, and Meo—is that they’re really brave. Even when they’re making reckless, maybe dumb, potentially catastrophic decisions, they’re doing it with impressive courage. I don’t think I’m ever that brave in my own life, but I do identify with the reasons they’re taking risks, the desperate hope and fear that drives them to make wild choices.

Celeste, in particular, comes to a point where she realizes she needs to do something pretty crazy, something that defies her own expectations of herself, in order to be true to the person she’s becoming. That moment in the story feels personal to me; I feel proud of the times when I’ve surprised myself by taking a risk, by choosing the less safe but more exciting choice.

5. What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
I think it's hard growing up in a time when it seems like there are a lot of potential disasters looming, and, in fact, you lived through one pretty recently—the pandemic. And maybe you're living through other ones now, big and small. As a young person, you might feel like you won't ever get to the other side. So, I hope readers walk away with the feeling that, actually, they can get through things: that's what humans do, and, in fact, that's how we become ourselves.

The Rec: Finally, we love YA and recommendations—what’s your favorite YA book you've read recently?
I recently read the wildly entertaining Victories Greater Than Death, a space opera by Charlie Jane Anders, the first in her Unstoppable trilogy. I’m not actually a huge sci-fi person, but I could not put this book down. The whole cast of characters has such insane charisma! You just can’t wait to follow them down every weird and dangerous wormhole on their quest to save the oppressed and restore justice to the universe.