Gilmore Girls meets Wuthering Heights in Mary O’Connell’s Dear Reader, a whip-smart, poignant, modern-day take on Emily Brontë’s common novel.

For seventeen-year-old Flannery Fields, the only respite from the plaid-skirted mean women at Sacred Heart High School is her beloved instructor Miss Sweeney’s AP English class. But when Miss Sweeney doesn’t arrive to teach Flannery’s favorite book, Wuthering Heights, abandoning her handbag, Flannery understands something is wrong.

The police are called, and about Dear Reader: A Novel Flannery gives them everything-except Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. This she keeps onto. And positive thing she will, because when she opens it, it has somehow changed into Miss Sweeney’s real-time journal. It appears Miss Sweeney is within New York City-and she’s in trouble.

So Flannery will something extremely unFlannery-like: she skips college and models out for Manhattan, with the publication as her guideline. But as soon as she gets there, she matches a boy named Heath. Heath is usually British, on the gap year, extremely smart-yet he’s never heard about Albert Einstein or Anne Frank. In fact, Flannery can’t help convinced that he seems to have stepped through the webpages of Brontë’s book. Can it be?