Sixteen-year-old Alice Carroll is a self-illustrated girl; grieving her mother's death two years before, hating her father for abandoning her and resenting her grandmother's low expectations, she armors herself with ink before entering a new high school in a privileged neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her entry into that Wonderland of sculptured landscaping and SUVs is complicated by her summer flirtation with Matthew, a nice college boy who comes by her work at Comikaze Coffee, a coffee and comics shop, to walk her home most nights. Alice’s expectations are low; she’s had too many losses to believe that anyone stays, more losses than anyone knows. But some people ignore her warnings, finding a way beyond Alice’s illustrated walls, and she’s torn between trusting in friendship and holding on tight to grief. ALICE IN BLACK is a contemporary young adult novel and the first in the Willamette High series. Bebe Duncan is the author of Contemporary Young Adult novels in the Willamette High series, ALICE IN BLACK and PET SHOP GIRL, set in Portland, Oregon. Her realistic fiction focuses on social and family issues that teen girls face, from a first-person perspective, and on developing characters with challenges that resonate with readers. Long a writer of narrative nonfiction, she was reintroduced to YA by her daughter, and the sense of immediacy, the emotions portrayed, and the action in that genre inspired her to start noveling stat. She lives in Portland with her family and two humongous goldfish named Richard and Blanche. When she's not immersed in nouns and verbs or reading aloud as she edits, she revels in crime shows, YA fiction, WNBA games on TV, and walking a zillion miles a day. You can visit her online at www.bebeduncan.com and on Instagram.