Wish You Were Her

Gr 9 Up–Allegra Brooks, 18, is looking to have a normal teenage summer. She has been in the spotlight ever since her acting career took off. Allegra is also autistic, a fact she hasn’t shared with the public. She plans to spend the summer with her father in Lake Pristine as an escape, helping in his bookshop and running the annual Book Festival he organizes. Before heading to Lake Pristine, she emails the bookshop and begins an anonymous email relationship with one of the booksellers. Not long after her arrival, she believes her email pen pal to be kind Simon—but it’s actually Jonah, who isn’t the most welcoming at first. But as the summer unfolds and Allegra and Jonah spend time together, they learn that their first impressions of each other may have been wrong, and that they are more alike than they thought. This is a heartwarming story about two autistic teens navigating life and falling in love. While Allegra and Jonah both recognize that they have autism and that it makes life more challenging, they don’t let it define or hinder them. While confident from the beginning of the story, both characters still grow and change over the course of the book. However, there is still negativity they each face: for Jonah, because people know he is autistic, while Allegra faces challenges because so many don’t. The story also centers around a bookshop and a book festival, adding a bit of fun for book lovers. Main characters are cued white.