Look - Hardcover

Romanoff, Zan

 
9780525554264: Look
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525554262 ISBN 13: 9780525554264
Verlag: Dial Books, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

"[For] readers of Nina LaCour . . . Sharply incisive [and] deeply romantic." --Booklist

"Part coming-of-age story, part slow-burn romance, part feminist-manifesto." --SLJ

"[One of] the LGBTQ books that will change the literary landscape." --O Magazine

What Lulu Shapiro's 5,000 Flash followers don't know:

  • The video of her with another girl was never supposed to go public.
  • Owen definitely wasn't supposed to break up with her because of it.
  • Behind the online persona Lulu painstakingly curates, her life feels like a terrible, uncertain mess.

    • Then Lulu meets Cass. Cass isn't interested in looking at Lulu's life, only in living in it for real. And The Hotel--a gorgeous space with an intriguing, Old Hollywood history--seems like the perfect hideaway for their deepening romance. But just because Lulu has stepped out of the spotlight doesn't mean it'll stop following her every move.

    Look is about what you present vs. who you really are, about real and manufactured intimacy and the blurring of that line. It's a deceptively glamorous, utterly compelling, beautifully written, queer coming-of-age novel about falling in love and taking ownership of your own self--your whole self--in the age of social media.

    "Romantic and deeply resonant...Everything I hoped for and more." --Robyn Schneider, author of The Beginning of Everything
    "Witty, sensual, well-observed." --Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
    "I loved this book." --Mary H. K. Choi, author of Emergency Contact
    "A beautifully rendered...feminist coming-of-age story." --Jessica Morgan of Go Fug Yourself
    "Gorgeous." --Robin Benway, author of Far From the Tree
    "A complex, empathic examination of identity." --Amy Spalding, author of The Summer of Jordi Perez
    "A beautiful, intimate novel. I loved it so much." --Maurene Goo, author of The Way You Make Me Feel
    "Immediate...Deft...Astute...Compelling...Gripping and credible." --BCCB
    "[Zan Romanoff] is one of the best YA writers working today."--Brandy Colbert, author of Little & Lion

    Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

    Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

    Zan Romanoff was born in Los Angeles and raised in its private schools. She is the author of the novels A Song to Take the World Apart and Grace and the Fever. Her nonfiction has appeared in Buzzfeed, Elle, GQ, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, among others. Zan lives, writes, and watches a lot of reality television in LA.

    Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

    CHAPTER ONE

    Lulu arranges the image before she turns the camera on herself. Patrick’s mother is kind of a monster, but at least she’s the kind who makes sure all of the lighting in her house is flattering, even in rarely used guest bathrooms. You have to give her credit for that, Lulu thinks.

    The light in here is so even that it almost seems sourceless. The shell pink of the wall is suede-soft, and it makes Lulu’s hard-earned winter tan glow golden in contrast. Everyone who’s not at the party will wonder where the hell she is when they see this.

    So will the people who are here, actually. She didn’t tell anyone that she was going upstairs, and most of them don’t know the house well enough to recognize this room without context. The image will pop up on their screens at some point tonight, and they won’t be able to identify where she was when she took it.

    They won’t ask. That’s a thirsty move, and they’re all supposed to be better than that. The idea of parties like this one is that you only get invited if you act like the invitation doesn’t matter to you.
    Lulu explained this to her older sister once.

    “Doesn’t it gross you out?” Naomi asked. “Treating your life like it’s a game?”

    “Don’t you like to know the rules?” Lulu asked her in return.

    Lulu was fifteen then, spending her afternoons riding around in Kingsley Adams’s BMW, learning how to smoke weed and how to drive stick, and how to tell if a boy liked you or just liked the way you looked next to him, stoned and pliant, riding shotgun.

    She was wrong about how much King liked her, as it turned out, but right about the rules in general. There were rewards for knowing what they were and following them carefully. Rewards like when Lulu leaves a party to be alone for a little while, people assume that it’s because there’s something wrong with the party, instead of thinking there’s something wrong with her.

    Lulu is pleased when her image blinks onto the screen. It looks like she imagined it: Her long dark hair is caught up in a messy topknot, pinned in place by a slash of gold. Bea made her laugh so hard she cried earlier, when the sun was still up and the world still seemed interesting, so her eye makeup is a little smudged in a way that suggests she’s been having too much fun to bother fixing it. She gave Owen his ring back but kept the chain she wore it on. Its empty curve dangles below the frame, where it won’t give too much away.

    Lulu closes her eyes, opens them, and snaps herself in the act of looking up, so that the picture looks like it’s been taken by someone standing over her, catching the edge of her attention. Then she takes a movie: her looking at the camera, and then laughing, and then looking away. She thinks maybe she should be embarrassed—it’s kind of cheap, just her flirting with herself—but whatever, because it will also work.

    She posts the files and then settles on the stool at the edge of the bathtub to thumb through the rest of her Flash timeline. She can probably kill at least another fifteen minutes before anyone thinks to come looking for her, and hopefully that someone will be Owen or Bea. If it’s Bea, she can talk her into leaving—going home and going to sleep.

    If it’s Owen, she won’t have to work very hard to give everyone something new to wonder about.
    When the bathroom door opens, though, Lulu doesn’t recognize the girl who walks through it.
    “Shit,” the girl says, even though Lulu is fully clothed and sitting like four feet from the toilet. “I’m so sorry. Shit, shit, shit, sorry.”

    Her hair is curly and copper red, and she’s milk pale, freckle-sprinkled, very thin. She flushes pink and takes a step backward, knocking into the open door. “Ow,” she says, and then, again, “Sorry.”
    Lulu can’t help but be charmed. “It’s fine,” she says. “I mean, I’m not, like, using it. The room. I’m just taking a break. You can—” She starts to stand.

    “No!” the girl says. “No, honestly, I’m—I was going to do the same thing.”

    She’s still flushed, but smiling now too. Lulu, who endured years of middle school orthodontia, admires the almost aggressive evenness of her teeth.

    “Kind of sucks down there, huh,” Lulu says. She sits again. “But Patrick’s parties are always like this, don’t you think? He likes getting shit-faced so much that he forgets there are other things we could be doing. Like, anything else. I’d play cards right now. Boggle. Anything but sitting around doing shots.”

    “This is my first,” the girl says. “Party. Here, I mean. Not, like, my first party ever.”

    “Thank god,” Lulu says. “I would hate for this one to ruin your opinion of them.”

    The girl laughs. “I’m Cass,” she says. “By the way.”

    “Lulu,” Lulu says. She doesn’t offer her hand, and Cass doesn’t either. Lulu can’t decide if Cass recognizes her or not, and it would be way too narcissistic to ask.

    It seems like she probably doesn’t; she isn’t watchful around Lulu the way girls who know her from the internet sometimes are. They usually don’t say anything, but their eyes jitter across her body restlessly, trying and failing to look away.

    Cass slumps down to sit with her back against the counter, stretching her legs out on the fluffy rug in front of her.

    No one cares that much about you, Lulu reminds herself. She’s the one who cares way too much about everyone else.

    Speaking of caring, she can’t stop herself from doing her usual assessment: Cass is wearing slightly too much mascara, a thin white T-shirt, and tight black jeans Lulu doesn’t recognize the brand of. The soles of her flats are scuffed with patterns of wear. Lulu can’t decide whether Cass is trying and kind of failing, or if maybe she doesn’t even know she should be trying.

    When Cass pulls an iPhone with a cracked screen and no cover out of her pocket, a third possibility occurs to Lulu.

    Is it possible that Cass just doesn’t care about trying either way?

    “Do you and Patrick go to school together?” Lulu asks, trying to triangulate.

    “Yeah,” Cass says. She frowns at something on the phone and swipes it away dismissively. Then she looks up at Lulu, her face glowing faintly blue from its light. “How do you know our host?”

    “Elementary,” Lulu says. “JTD.”

    So Cass goes to Lowell. She doesn’t look like the Lowell girls Lulu’s met. There’s usually a particular put-together sheen to them, she thinks. Something about Cass strikes her as raw. She’s not undone on purpose, like Lulu’s own carefully careless bun. But there’s something about her that’s just—

    “I didn’t grow up here,” Cass says.

    —what it is, Lulu thinks. She asks, “When did you move?”

    “To LA? When I was twelve. I transferred to Lowell when I was a freshman.”

    Lulu gets distracted by her phone, which is lighting up with notifications: people liking her post, and replying to it, and sending her videos of their own. She’s getting to the point, follower-wise, where she’s going to have to turn notifications off soon. Every time she posts anything, there’s a flood of this, just nonsense—girls she doesn’t know asking her where she got her...

    „Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

    Verlag
    Dial Books
    Erscheinungsdatum
    2020
    Sprache
    Englisch
    ISBN 10 
    0525554262
    ISBN 13 
    9780525554264
    Einband
    Gebundene Ausgabe
    Anzahl der Seiten
    368
    Kontakt zum Hersteller
    Nicht verfügbar
    Verantwortliche Person
    Mayer, Paape, Voigt Kompakt Schallplatten GbR
    https://www.kompakt.fm

    Werder Str. 15-19
    K�ln
    50672
    Deutschland

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