The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp Rice, Eva

Tara Jupp is fifteen and convinced she's an expert on everything — boys, her body, the way the world works. She's also spectacularly wrong about most of it. Eva Rice captures that specific teenage delusion where confidence and cluelessness collide, tracking Tara through a year of misread signals, mortifying mistakes, and the slow, painful realization that growing up means admitting you don't have it figured out. Set against the backdrop of 1990s England, this is a coming-of-age novel that doesn't romanticize adolescence or pretend it's anything other than messy, confusing, and occasionally devastating. Rice writes with sharp wit and real tenderness for her protagonist's fumbling attempts at adulthood. For anyone who survived their teens by the skin of their teeth, or anyone who wants to remember what it felt like to be that certain and that wrong at the same time.