Stephanie Morrill

Getting a fresh start is harder than it looks.

Skylar Hoyt is a girl who seems to have it all—she’s pretty, popular, and has a great-looking boyfriend. Her senior year should be the best one yet. But a horrible experience at a summer party has changed everything. Now she’s vowing to make better choices, including going back to church. But as Skylar tries to gain new perspective on life, the world as she knows it begins to fall apart.

Her parents are constantly fighting. Her younger sister has a big secret that Skylar is forced to keep. The guy she’s dating is annoyingly jealous. And the new guy down the street is just plain annoying. In the midst of the chaos, Skylar starts to wonder who her real friends are and, even more importantly, who she is.

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In Stephanie’s Words

To me, Me, Just Different is about the crumbling world of a girl who thought herself untouchable and discovers she doesn’t really know herself at all. Even though our lives might look very different from Skylar’s, I think we’ve all experienced situations that have tried us and led us to discover we aren’t everything we thought we were.

The facet of Skylar’s story I’m particularly attached to is her friendship with Jodi. The idea came from a friendship of mine in middle and high school. Anytime my friend and I liked a guy, he usually wound up liking both of us back. It was a very strange phenomenon that happened four and a half times (one guy we both liked, but he only liked her). One time in eighth grade it very nearly destroyed our friendship, and I remember how even in the midst of the craziness, I felt very disappointed in myself. I wanted—much like Skylar does—to be stronger than I was and to not care what everyone thought.

This book is also very special to me because it’s the first one I wrote after my husband and I got married. We lived in the neighborhood next to Skylar’s and spent a lot of time at Sheridan’s talking about who Skylar and Connor were. A lot of thoughts from those conversations made it into the book. And so did the ice cream.