Description
Sometimes looking to the past helps you find your future.
Abbi Hope Goldstein is like every other teenager, with a few smallish exceptions: her famous alter ego, Baby Hope, is the subject of internet memes, she has asthma, and sometimes people spontaneously burst into tears when they recognize her. Abbi has lived almost her entire life in the shadow of September 11. On that terrible day, she was captured in what became an iconic photograph: Abbi (aka "Baby Hope") wears a birthday crown and grasps a red balloon; just behind her, the South Tower of the World Trade Center is collapsing.
Now, fifteen years later, Abbi is desperate for anonymity and decides to spend the summer before her seventeenth birthday incognito as a counselor at Knight's Day Camp two towns away.
Too bad Noah Stern, whose own world was irrevocably shattered on 9/11, has a similar summer plan. When he recognizes Abbi, he believes his meeting Baby Hope is fate. Soon, though, the two team up to ask difficult questions about the story behind the Baby Hope photo. But is either of them ready to hear the answers?
Hope and Other Punch Lines is about resilience and reinvention, first love and lifelong friendship, the legacies of loss, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. It asks the essential question: What does happily-ever-after look like in this beautiful, broken world?
Abbi Hope Goldstein is like every other teenager, with a few smallish exceptions: her famous alter ego, Baby Hope, is the subject of internet memes, she has asthma, and sometimes people spontaneously burst into tears when they recognize her. Abbi has lived almost her entire life in the shadow of September 11. On that terrible day, she was captured in what became an iconic photograph: Abbi (aka "Baby Hope") wears a birthday crown and grasps a red balloon; just behind her, the South Tower of the World Trade Center is collapsing.
Now, fifteen years later, Abbi is desperate for anonymity and decides to spend the summer before her seventeenth birthday incognito as a counselor at Knight's Day Camp two towns away.
Too bad Noah Stern, whose own world was irrevocably shattered on 9/11, has a similar summer plan. When he recognizes Abbi, he believes his meeting Baby Hope is fate. Soon, though, the two team up to ask difficult questions about the story behind the Baby Hope photo. But is either of them ready to hear the answers?
Hope and Other Punch Lines is about resilience and reinvention, first love and lifelong friendship, the legacies of loss, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. It asks the essential question: What does happily-ever-after look like in this beautiful, broken world?