Freefall Summer

WHUFFO: Someone who hasn't made a skydive (yet), especially a spectator. Supposedly derived from "What for do you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?"

Sixteen-year-old Clancy is no stranger to extreme sports. Her father runs a skydiving dropzone, but after her mother dies in a freak accident, her father grounds her--permanently. Clancy is resigned to being a whuffo and packing parachutes for her dad's latest girlfriend until cute college freshman Denny starts taking classes at the drop zone. Denny assumes Clancy is eighteen, an innocent mistake that gives her a rush--and that she doesn't correct.
But the lies snowball, relationships are damaged, and suddenly Clancy isn't the person she wants to be. She wants to make things right . . . but it seems the more Clancy imagines the life of a skydiver, the more she imagines she can escape her dull reality of life outside the drop zone. Will Clancy make the jump?

Tracy Barrett is the author of more than twenty books for children and young adults, as well as being a scholar and professor. Her fiction titles include Anna of Byzantium (Penguin Random House), The Stepsister's Tale (Harlequin Teen), and the middle-grade series The Sherlock Files (Henry Holt). She knows more about ancient Greece and Rome and the European Middle Ages than anyone really needs to know, can reads lots of dead languages, and used to jump out of airplanes. She lives in Tennessee with her husband (also a former skydiver) and two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.