Tell It to Naomi

Dave Rosen has a secret. “Naomi,” the wise, witty, always-on-target, female writer behind his high school’s hit advice column, is, well, him. A native New Yorker who likes secondhand CD shops, The Simpsons, and meatball heroes.

A kid like him doesn’t have all the answers. He doesn’t even have most of the answers. Dave only got himself dragged into this fiasco to help out his older sister, the real Naomi―and because he let himself be convinced that it might, in some lunatic way, enable him to meet his dream girl, the senior who gets his weak little sophomore heart racing: Celeste Fanucci. If he could get Celeste to write in and open up her soul to “Naomi,” he could use this secret knowledge to transform himself.

He could bridge the unbridgeable chasm between sophomore boys and senior girls. It’s a grand, grand scheme. And it’s about to go haywire.

Daniel Ehrenhaft has written numerous novels, often under the name Daniel Parker, and is the recipient of the 2003 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Novel for The Wessex Papers, Volumes 1 through 3. He lives with his wife, Jessica, in New York City, and would never, ever give her advice unless she wanted him to.
From the Trade Paperback edition.