My Life: A Series of Bad Decisions
Maya Kowalski is thirteen years old, intensely curious, constitutionally unable to stop talking about science, and absolutely terrible at being normal. She knows this about herself. She has documented it extensively.
Told in the style of a personal diary, the novel follows Maya through the entirety of seventh grade ? a year she begins eating lunch alone by the emergency exit with a book as a social shield, and ends standing in the June sunshine arguing with two best friends about the definition of explosions.
The story opens with the Westbrook Middle School Science Fair, where Maya's ambitious electrochemical battery project collapses into a chemistry demonstration that covers the judges, the gymnasium ceiling, and one dry-clean-only blazer in expanding chemical foam. From there, Maya embarks on an accidental campaign of self-discovery disguised as a series of increasingly bad decisions: joining the drama club on the strength of a flyer and zero preparation, reciting a passage about Marie Curie at her audition because it was the only two minutes of material she had memorized, accidentally defending thermodynamic science against a stranger on the internet and going briefly viral, and attending a school dance where everything goes well until a punch bowl doesn't.
Along the way, Maya acquires three things she wasn't expecting and didn't know how to want: Priya, a quietly brilliant girl who color-codes her research notes and always has a cookie ready at the right moment; Destiny, who says exactly what she thinks, appears from nowhere with napkins during emergencies, and has the social instincts of a very perceptive hawk; and Ethan Park, a boy who does math problems multiple ways to check, whose yearbook quote is Maya's words, and who occupies a category in her journal she hasn't fully named yet but has drawn two stars next to.
At its heart, the novel is about the distance between knowing something and actually believing it ? Maya knows, factually, that being herself is acceptable. It takes one exploded science fair, forty-seven lemons, a viral video, a slow dance, and a punch bowl incident before she believes it. The science, as it turns out, was correct all along. The scale was just the problem.
Funny, warm, and deeply specific, My Life: A Series of Bad Decisions is a book for anyone who has ever eaten a tater tot they didn't want just to prove a point, and then launched it into someone's apple juice anyway.
