Ready, Okay! — Adam Cadre

Meet Allen Mockery: "The day I turned sixteen years old I had no idea that in four months nearly everyone I cared about would be dead. Unburdened by this foreknowledge, it was with a free and unclouded spirit that I went down to the DMV and failed my driving test."

So begins Adam Cadre's captivating, darkly comic story of teenage life in America in the new millennium, fold through the lives of Allen and a parade of friends and foes, each more vivid and memorable than the last:

Peggy: "You can hit it off with all kinds of people, but once you've shared a counterespionage run with someone, well, that's the kind of bond that goes deeper than sharing your math notes."

Siren: "They asked us what our career plans were and Siren said she was going to be a Laker Girl. Then we fed these milelong Scantrons into a computer and it said that the career that she was actually best suited for was Laker Girl."

Echo: "Her eyes could bore a hole in you the size of a chicken pot pie and she always dressed entirely in black, which is pretty lame but certainly impresses the hell out of most fifteen-year-olds."

Molly: "She had her own heater to make sure her room stayed a toasty eighty-four degrees. This probably would've been uncomfortably hot if not for the fact that Molly refused to wear any clothing whatsoever."

These are just a few of the people you'll meet watching Allen and friends fry to shepherd one another through a minefield of violence, drugs, and parental abandonment as their story careens to its gripping ending. Adam Cadre has created a heartfelt, original novel that offers a new way of looking at the perennial struggles of teenagers. Ready, Okay! is just the right novel at the right time powerful and entertaining story that an entire generation of readers can embrace and call its own.