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Gretchen Meyers doesn’t know exactly what she did wrong, but life is beginning to suck. As if having a semi-nudist family wasn’t awkward enough, she seems to have lost her best friend to the fanatical school swimming team, and her maths grade is so close to negative digits that only emergency tutoring can save it. So far, so high school. Then James/Dean rolls into her life – also known as her zit-faced tutor James, and his slightly less zit-faced cousin Dean. Kind-hearted rebels without a cause, they draw Gretchen out of classroom hell, and briefly the world seems full of possibility again. But then everything changes over the course of one awful night. Bewildered by harsh new emotions of grief and love, Gretchen realises she must now decide who she wants to be, and what it means to be loyal.
Written entirely in poems as self-confessed poetry geek Gretchen finds new ways of expressing herself, GEEK IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD is a tale of haiku, high-fives and heartache. It explores with rich humour all the anguished details of teenage life – unrequited crushes, younger sisters with enviable dating records, the comforting properties of chocolate brownies…A sensitively-drawn chronicle of the unnerving process of growing up, GEEK is above all a funny and heartfelt novel about a girl finding her feet.
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