Dear Medusa

Alicia Rivers is sixteen, and the hallways of her school are full of whispers about her. Classmates have decided she is a girl who has had sex, and they use a dozen cruel words to say it. What they do not know is that a popular teacher sexually abused her, and that the trauma has left her feeling like a stranger in her own body.

Alicia has lost a great deal. Her best friend abandoned her, she quit the track team, and she now spends her days in detention, isolated and unseen. Like the mythical Medusa, she has been cast as the monster in her own story rather than the victim: the girl who asked for it.

Then letters begin appearing in her locker, and they hint that another girl was harmed too. Alicia works to hold up the walls she has built around what happened. At the same time she grows attracted to a new girl at school, and that attraction makes her ask what the walls are really keeping out.

This is a young adult novel in verse, told in an intimate first-person register. It deals directly with sexual abuse, and it also takes in race, sexuality and love. Alicia's anger runs through the book as something she has to reclaim along with her story and her body. Expect a raw, emotional read in short, spare lines.