Caring Is Creepy [Paperback]

Fifteen-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue is doing her best to make it through a difficult summer. Her mother works long hours as a nurse, and Lynn suspects that her mother’s pill-popping boyfriend has enlisted her in his petty criminal enterprises. Lynn finds refuge in online flirtations, eventually meeting up with a troubled young soldier, Logan Loy, and inviting him home. When he’s forced to stay over in a storage space accessible through her closet, and the Army subsequently lists him as AWOL, she realizes that he’s the one thing in her life that she can control. Meanwhile, her mother’s boyfriend is on the receiving end of a series of increasingly violent threats, which places Lynn squarely in the cross-hairs.

Praise for Caring is Creepy

Alex Award Winner

Lynn’s voice is authentically sardonic and compelling.... The intersections of Lynn’s and Logan’s story line with the consequences of Hayes’s shady dealings are consistently exciting.
—Publishers Weekly

David Zimmerman has written a beautifully menacing novel. I found it impossible to stop reading—as teenage girls flirt with danger online, an AWOL soldier hides out in a closet, and drug deals go dead wrong—and you will too, as the danger steadily escalates, the sentences unspooling like a detonator line that sizzles toward an explosive, unforgettable ending.
—Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh

This story is sweet, funny, sad, infuriating, and all too real.
—TulS9