The Quiet Part Out Loud

A Good Morning America Buzz Pick

For fans of You’ve Reached Sam and A Heart in a Body in the World, this “moving and powerful” (Laura Namey Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow) teen novel follows an ex-couple as they struggle to reunite in the wake of a devastating earthquake.

High school sweethearts Mia Clementine and Alfie Thanasis had a plan to escape their town for college in the east. Mia would leave her hard-core evangelical home for Sarah Lawrence College, and Alfie would have a new place to pursue his three loves: baseball, poetry, and Mia. But when Alfie got offered a scholarship to the University of San Francisco the same week the entire town found out about Mia’s mom’s affair with their church’s pastor, Mia’s world imploded and she pushed everyone away…including Alfie.

Five months after the worst summer ever, Mia is crashing at her best friend’s dorm at San Francisco State, just a few miles away from the University of San Francisco, praying she never runs into the boy whose heart she broke. And Alfie is trying to make the most of his freshman year while struggling to reconcile with the abrupt ending of his first love.

When Mia and Alfie’s paths cross for the briefest of moments, Mia realizes she never should have let him go and Alfie’s suppressed memories and feelings boil to the surface. But their reunion is cut short when a massive earthquake rocks San Francisco, leaving them to stumble desperately across the rubble in search of the ex they still love before the city crumbles—taking one, or both, of them with it.

Deborah Crossland teaches English and mythology at her local community college, studies mythology and depth psychology in her PhD program, and writes myth-based, contemporary novels for young adults. She is also a founding board member of the nonprofit Fernweh Collective, which focuses on cultural education through experiential learning. You can find her talking all things myth on Fernweh Collective’s happy hour video on YouTube. She lives in Northern California with her husband and her daughter’s very spoiled retired service dog.