"Girl Next Door is everything I love. Complex characters, a prickly love interest, secrets, yearning, questionable decisions, and that glorious HEA. A tender, funny, sexy novel." -- Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn't Care
"Witty, sexy, and the best kind of messy, Girl Next Door is my favorite brand of beautifully chaotic and honest romance. I devoured it in one sitting, and you better believe I'll be picking up whatever Meredith writes next." -- Dahlia Adler, award-winning author of Cool for the Summer
In this charming debut rom-com, a young freelancer returns to her suburban hometown to uncover why her childhood next door neighbor's bestselling book appears to be an epic love story about the two of them.
When MC Calloway's best friend Joe, an editor at the notorious gossip website Jawbreaker, calls her in for an emergency meeting, MC is unprepared for how frantic he is. But when he shows her a copy of Girl Next Door, the steamy, bestselling rom-com taking the literary world by storm, written under a pen name, points to one of the women on the front cover, and says, "that's you," its MC who begins to panic.
Joe is convinced that the author is Nora Pike, MC's prickly, childhood next-door neighbor, and their former high school classmate - and MC knows he's right, since the book describes actual events that happened their senior year, down to the tiniest details. But in the book, the characters based on MC and Nora are desperately in love, rather than the awkward acquaintances MC remembers being in real life.
Joe begs MC to go home undercover and get the scoop on Nora. That's the last thing MC wants to do, especially for an assignment that seems morally dubious at best, but she reluctantly agrees, knowing Joe is desperate to break a big story. Crashing in her childhood home with her older brother Conrad (now married to MC's secret high school crush, Gabby), MC begins untangling truth from fiction, trying to get close to Nora, who is just as hot and prickly as ever - and now suspicious of MC to boot. But the more involved she gets with Nora, the more it becomes clear they're both hiding secrets ... and MC realizes she might be in over her head.
Perfect for readers of Delilah Green Doesn't Care and Book Lovers, Girl Next Door is a delicious debut brimming with romance, humor, and heart.
About the Author :
Rachel Meredith grew up on Long Island and now lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her wife and their two daughters. Girl Next Door is her first novel.
Jeremy Carlisle Parker is an actor working in New York City. Her love of narration began when she was a little girl-demanding that her father read Dr. Seuss every night, using only his best character voices. Books have been some of her best friends since childhood-in fact, she still holds the first-grade class record for most books read in an academic year at 650! Being a trained opera singer and actor, narration is the perfect means to marry her passion for performance and lifelong love of books. Jeremy is proudly queer and deeply committed to amplifying queer voices in all aspects of her creative life when possible. She holds a Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, and artist diploma from the esteemed University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) and is a proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA. When Jeremy isn't in the booth, you can find her tie-dying t-shirts in her kitchen sink while listening to true crime podcasts and catching up on RuPaul's Drag Race.
