Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia, Terry Ribera (Illustrator)

Lemon grew up with Stella, a single mom who wasn’t exactly maternal. Stella always had a drink in her hand and a new boyfriend every few months, and when things got out of hand, she would whisk Lemon off to a new town for a fresh beginning. Now, just as they are moving yet again, Lemon discovers that she is pregnant from a reckless encounter—with a guy Stella had been flirting with.

On the verge of revisiting her mother’s mistakes, Lemon struggles to cope with the idea of herself as a young unmarried mother, as well as the fact that she’s never met her own father. Determined to have at least one big adventure before she has the baby, Lemon sets off on a cross-country road trip, intending not only to meet her father, but to figure out who she wants to be.

Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Realistic Fiction, Romance, Fiction, Road Trip, Family

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2012

About the author

Kristen-Paige Madonia is the author of Invisible Fault Lines (Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2016) and Fingerprints of You (S&S BFYR, 2012); recent short fiction can be found in Five Chapters, New Orleans Review, American Fiction: Best Previously Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers, and the Greensboro Review. She was awarded a 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship and has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony. She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA and teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, James Madison University, and the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. For more information, please visit http://www.kristenpaigemadonia.com