Crash Test Love

From the Trade Paperback edition.

The last thing Henry Arlington wants is a girlfriend. He's just very, very good with girls—reading their body language, knowing what they want to hear, and more importantly: getting them into the backseat of his car. But all that changes when he meets Garrett Lennox at one of the many Sweet Sixteen parties he crashes.
 
Garrett thinks she's done with guys. She was dumped by her ex when she moved from Chicago to Long Island, and now she realizes that she needs to find out who she is by herself, instead of with a boyfriend. What she really needs is some good friends.
 
Fortunately for Garrett, the J Squad—the "it" girls of East Shore High School—want her in their clique. All she has to do is pass one little test: get East Shore god Henry Arlington to take her to one of the biggest Sweet Sixteens of the year, then dump him in front of everyone.
 
Garrett has promised herself not to fall for another guy, so playing with Henry's heart shouldn't be hard. Right?
 
And Henry doesn't fall for girls, so when he and Garrett start to click, it doesn't matter. Does it?
As William Shakespeare once said, "Love is blind," or in this case, the lovers may be, as Henry and Garrett fall in love—and into the trap that awaits them. Because neither of them can even begin to see what the girls of Henry Arlington's past have in store.
 
This hilarious, sharp, and surprisingly thoughtful novel is the teen Wedding Crashers, filled with love, hope, laughs, and surprising insights about the terrifying process of falling in love.

Publishers Weekly

Henry Arlington is a self-confessed ladies' man (his personal rules include "Never tell a girl your real name" and "No hos before bros"). But all it takes is a chance encounter with knockout new girl Garrett, and he is contemplating breaking another rule--no girlfriends. Their relationship evolves in alternating firstperson chapters; Henry becomes more sympathetic as it becomes clear that his attitude toward women stems from abandonment by his mother, though his love of film (evidenced mostly by conversations that appear in screenplay format) feels as artificial as the incorporation of song titles and lyrics into Garrett's narration--"Then my thoughts turn to Ben and ‘The Day We Fell Apart' (Kelly Clarkson, 2009)." The secondary characters, from the J Squad clique to Henry's oafish cohorts, never amount to more than stereotypes. Still, the emotional intensity--sometimes passionate, sometimes tender--that develops between Garrett and Henry should help some readers care about them enough to want to find out whether, against the odds, they can make their love work. Ages 14-up. (June)

Ted Michael was born in 1984 and grew up in Roslyn Heights, New York. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School and is a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. His first novel, The Diamonds, is available from Delacorte Press.