Description

To boost her college applications, seventeen-year-old Eloise, a loner girl struggling with her mental health, volunteers at a senior support center where she meets a dynamic elderly woman and a perpetually cheerful boy who challenge her to step out of her comfort zone.

Publisher Marketing:
Hacks gets a romantic twist in the vein of Jenn Bennett in this "simmering" (Publishers Weekly) novel about a standoffish teen girl whose loner status gets challenged by a dynamic elderly woman and a perpetually cheerful boy.

Eloise Deane is the worst and doesn't care who knows it. She's grumpy, prefers to be alone, and is just slogging through senior year with one goal: get accepted to USC and move to California. So when her guidance counselor drops the bombshell that to score a scholarship she'll desperately need, her applications require volunteer hours, Eloise is up for the challenge. Until she's paired with LifeCare, a volunteer agency that offers social support to lonely seniors through phone calls and visits. Basically, it's a total nightmare for Eloise's anxiety.

Eloise realizes she's made a huge mistake--especially when she's paired with Austin, the fellow volunteer who's the sunshine to her cloudy day. But as Eloise and Austin work together to keep Marianne Landis--the mysterious former frontwoman of the 1970s band the Laundromats--company, something strange happens. Eloise actually...likes Marianne and Austin? She isn't sure what to do with that, especially when her feelings toward Austin begin to blur into more-than-friends territory.

And when ex-girlfriends, long-buried wounds, and insecurities reappear, Eloise will have a choice to make: go all in with Marianne and Austin or get out before she gets hurt.