Tim Mason was The Boy Most Likely To: find the liquor cabinet blindfolded need a liver transplant drive his car into a house. You don’t have to have read “My Life Next Door” to understand “The Boy Most Likely To.' It reads fine on its own, but fans of the first will especially enjoy returning to the Garretts' backyard, this time to see sparks fly between Tim and Alice. Her latest, “The Boy Most Likely To,” is a companion novel to her first, this time taking two side characters and making them protagonists of their own star-crossed love story. I get tired of winter, but I forgive Dartmouth again every spring and summer.” Plus, Dartmouth does summer so beautifully - the ocean air, the sunsets, the sight of the sailboats dotting the water. “We moved here when my oldest children were babies, and the four youngest were born here - so I have thousands of good memories of all those growing up years, watching them run into the ocean, playing on the beach, walking the trails at the Lloyd Center, riding the fire engine at the Holiday Stroll downtown.

“The beaches and the woods where the characters walk are more or less directly derived from the places I see around me every day,” she said. “Stony Bay is an amalgam of several towns I’ve known and loved,” said Fitzpatrick, who has lived in Dartmouth with her husband John and their six kids for 18 years. Her subjects, while edging close to adult themes - drinking, sex, drug references - stay within the realm of relating to teenagers, to a millennial’s world.Īll the books are set in Stony Bay - a fictional town that seems a lot like South Dartmouth.

Her debut novel for Penguin, “My Life Next Door” in 2013 was awesome, as was her sophomore YA novel, “What I Thought Was True” (2014) and third and latest, “The Boy Most Likely To” (2015).įitzpatrick is quickly making a name for herself in the YA world, and it’s because, like Sarah Dessen or Blume, she doesn’t shy away from real high school life. Martin or Judy Blume books I’d devour in one sitting. Her voice reminds me of the YA books of my middle school years - the Ann M. Dartmouth’s Huntley Fitzpatrick simply has a knack for Young Adult writing.

What i thought was true