"Filled with love, hope, and longing, this is a novel for readers of all ages." - Holly Goldberg Sloan Bestselling author Ann Hood crafts a funny, heartfelt story of a girl growing up in the heart of Beatlemania. The year is 1966. The Vietnam War rages overseas, the Beatles have catapulted into stardom, and twelve-year-old Rhode Island native Trudy Mixer is not thrilled with life. Her best friend, Michelle, has decided to become a cheerleader, everyone at school is now calling her Gertrude (her hated real name), and the gem of her middle school career, the Beatles fan club, has dwindled down to only three other members--the least popular kids at school. And at home, her workaholic father has become even more distant. Determined to regain her social status and prove herself to her father, Trudy looks toward the biggest thing happening worldwide: the Beatles. She is set on seeing them in Boston during their final world tour--and meeting her beloved Paul McCartney. So on a hot August day, unknown to their families, Trudy and crew set off on their journey, each of them with soaring hopes for what lies ahead. In her signature prose, Hood crafts an extraordinary story of growing up, making unexpected connections, and following your dreams even as the world in front of you--and the world at large--is changing too fast. Ann Hood is the author of the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most , The Obituary Writer , Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine , The Red Thread , and The Knitting Circle , as well as the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief , which was a New York Times Editor's Choice and chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly . She has won two Pushcart Prizes as well as a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, two Best American Food Writing Award, and a Best American Travel Writing award. A regular contributor to the New York Times , Hood's short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including Ploughshares , Tin House , Traveler , Bon Appetit , O , More , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , The Paris Review , and others. She is the editor of the anthologies Knitting Yarns: Writers Writing About Knitting , Knitting Pearls: More Writers Writing About Knitting , and Providence Noir . Hood is also the author of books for children, including the middle-grade novel, How I Saved My Father (And Ruined Everything Else) , and the ten-book Treasure Chest series for young readers. Her new memoir, Morningstar: Growing Up with Books , will be published in August. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City, and is married to the writer Michael Ruhlman. Prologue Here are things that have made me excited:   The day I found a sand dollar on the beach, all perfect and fragile and white. I was three or four years old and digging in the sand with my little red shovel. I used to love to build sand castles, and I would sit on my yellow-and-white-striped beach blanket and dig, dropping all that sand into my blue pail. Mom and I liked doing the drip technique when we built sand castles, which was to fill paper cups with water and drizzle the water over the castles to make turrets and towers. And this one day, my shovel hit something hard, so I put it down and started using my fingers instead, and I uncovered the sand dollar. I had never seen one before, but somehow I knew it was a rare and special thing. So special that I didn’t even pick it up right away. I just stared down at it resting in the smooth sand. My heart was beating hard and my mouth went dry and carefully I picked it up and held it, all warm and delicate, in the palm of my hand.   On the first day of first grade the teacher, Mrs. Kenney, made us come up to the board one by one and write our names. I sat in my little chair at my little desk, nervous that somehow I would do it wrong. I knew how to write my name. Well, print it in big block letters. TRUDY MIXER. I liked the mountains of the M and the sword swipe of the X and the tricky forked Y . But I’d never written it in front of so many people, on a blackboard. Poor Gwendolyn Zamborini was standing up there writing her name and it had so many letters and it was taking up so much space that she started to cry and had to sit back down. Doris Fish didn’t know how to write anything except the D , and she made it backward and stomped back to her seat, defiant. Robert Flick cried, too, because he was confused about his name—it was of course Robert, but everybody except Mrs. Kenney called him Bobby, and that was what he knew how to write. Then it was my turn, after so many mistakes and failures. I was wearing a navy-blue jumper with two pockets shaped like gray kitten heads on the front and a navy-blue pucker shirt and red knee socks and brand-new shoes with red laces. And I walked up to that blackboard, holding my breath the entire way. The chalk felt heavy in my hand when I lifted it to write that