Casey is an aspiring writer, a waitress, a woman in mourning who recently lost her mother and is estranged from her father, and is in a very transitional time in her life when she meets and falls in love with two very different men. A book about writing a book could have been too meta but King's characters leapt off the page and her writing style was raw and approachable. Casey's constant identity struggles and her unexplored grief drove the novel, and her complicated relationships with the men in her life kept me glued to the story. This was a classic contemporary coming-of-age novel told in an entirely new and exciting way.