From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his-based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. She’s smart, snarky and 16 she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents.

He’s a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone. Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus “Gus” Waters checking her out across the room in a group-therapy session for teens living with cancer. She’s fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. He’s in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. In this page-turner, Ius adroitly combines fact and hypothesis to explore one of the most notorious and unsolved murder cases in U.S. As the girls’ romantic relationship deepens, Bridget’s belief that Lizzie can be more than just her “father’s silly little girl” gives Lizzie the strength to disobey her parents and the power to take control of her own life. Bridget is everything Lizzie isn’t: well-traveled, sexually liberated, and free from shame and self-doubt. Lizzie is attracted to her from the moment she shows up on the Bordens’ doorstep. Enter Bridget Sullivan, the B&B’s new maid, a lovely white girl with an Irish accent. The illness makes her do strange, inexplicable-and sometimes horrific-things she can’t remember doing. Lizzie is mentally and physically ill she suffers from depression and anxiety and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a chronic condition aggravated by her period. Lizzie’s intense sense of Catholic guilt prevents her from pushing back, and her older sister’s escape from their toxic home makes Lizzie’s plight all the more painful. The white 17-year-old’s life isn’t easy: her emotionally and physically abusive parents have convinced the devoutly Catholic Lizzie that she’s too fragile to survive without them.

Present-tense narrator Lizbeth Borden lives with her father and stepmother in the Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts. The story of Lizzie Borden, creatively reimagined and set in the 21st century.

Lizzie by dawn ius