Common Good Books is pleased to host a launch party for Lara Avery’s first book, the young adult novel Anything But Ordinary.
Bryce
remembers it like it was yesterday. The scent of chlorine. The blinding
crack and flash of pain. Blood in the water. When she wakes up in the
hospital, all Bryce can think of is her disastrous Olympic diving trial.
But everything is different now. Bryce still feels seventeen, so how
can her little sister be seventeen, too? Life went on without her while
Bryce lay in a coma for five years. Her best friend and boyfriend have
just graduated from college. Her parents barely speak. And everything
she once dreamed of doing—winning a gold medal, traveling the world,
falling in love—seems beyond her reach.
But
Bryce has changed too, in seemingly impossible ways. She knows things
she shouldn’t. Things that happened while she was asleep. Things that
haven’t even happened yet. During one luminous summer, as she comes to
understand that her dreams have changed forever, Bryce learns to see
life for what it truly is: extraordinary.
----
Lara Avery is a recent graduate of Macalester College. Her writing has also been featured in The Onion AV Club, Bennington College’s plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009,
and on various stages in New York City as a participant in The Moth
StorySLAMS. Lara grew up in Topeka, Kansas, in a family of brothers,
reverent sports fans, and a golden retriever lab named Rusty.
