Jennifer Niven quit her job as a television producer to write the true story of a doomed 1913 Arctic expedition in her first book, The Ice Master, which was named one of the top ten nonfiction books by Entertainment Weekly, and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. She received high praise for her follow- up arctic adventure, Ada Blackjack, which detailed the life of one woman who overcame enormous odds to survive. Now, Niven tells a survival tale of a different kind; her own thrilling, excruciating, amazing, and utterly unforgettable adventure in a midwestern high school during the 1980s. Richmond, Indiana, was a place where people knew their neighbors and went to church on Sundays. It also had only one high school with 2,500 students, and for both the students and the townspeople, it was the center of the universe. In The Aqua-Net Diaries, Niven takes readers through her adolescent years in full, glorious—and hilarious—detail, sharing awkward moments from the first day of school, to driver’s ed, and her first love, against a backdrop of bad 1980s fashion and big hair. Like Chuck Klosterman in Fargo Rock City, Niven’s talented voice perfectly captures the pain, joy, and shame of going through adolescence in America’s heartland, making a funny, touching, and universal experience. High school is full of ups and downs, wins and losses, the highest highs and the lowest lows, and it’s pretty much the same regardless of time or location. Niven is so sure of the timeliness and universality of high-school experiences, she retrieved old memories and dug up all her old memorabilia from her less than glamorous high-school years in the mid-1980s in a small farm town in southern Indiana. Nevertheless, as Niven tells tales of her life as Jennifer McJunkin, spraying her hair to enormous heights and dreaming of fame, she does manage to rediscover the fun, excitement, and drama of those crucial times. Whether she’s organizing a speech team, arguing with classmates about Walter Mondale, or talking on the phone with Matthew Broderick, Niven relays it with humor, even if it was humiliating at the time. People who didn’t have the best time in school might find this memoir too cloying, but everyone will recognize themselves or people they knew in Niven’s chronicle. --Hilary Hatton JENNIFER NIVEN's first book, The Ice Master, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. Her second book, Ada Blackjack, was a Book Sense Top Ten Pick. Her memoir, The Aqua Net Diaries, was optioned by Warner Bros. Her bestselling debut novel, Velva Jean Learns to Drive, was followed by the sequel Velva Jean Learns to Fly. Her novel Becoming Clementine will be released in September. She lives in Los Angeles.