Hi everyone! Today I’m thrilled and excited to welcome author Kate McGovern to Pop! Goes The Reader as we share the exclusive cover reveal for Kate’s sophomore novel, Fear of Missing Out! Coming to a bookstore and library near you March 19th 2019 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Fear of Missing Out follows the story of Astrid who, after learning her cancer has returned, embarks on a road trip with her best friend and boyfriend in pursuit of a radical technology that promises to freeze and preserve her body until a cure becomes available. The cover art for Fear of Missing Out was created by Aimee Fleck. Please read on to learn more about Fear of Missing Out, including an exclusive excerpt from the novel and an opportunity for one lucky reader to win both a signed hardcover copy of Kate’s debut novel, Rules For 50/50 Chances, and an advance reader copy of Fear of Missing Out!
About Kate McGovern
Kate McGovern is the author of Rules For 50/50 Chances, which was called a “standout contemporary read” by Booklist. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a house full of books.
I’ve always thought an astrocytoma sounds like a shooting star. Right? Like something you’d want to watch from the roof of your house or the top of a really tall hill, probably lying on your back on a wool blanket and eating popcorn. On the news, they’d be all like, “Don’t miss the astrocytoma shower tonight! It’ll be most visible from nine to midnight, weather permitting. Once in a lifetime!” You’d lie there on your back on the blanket, waiting for it, and then it would cross the sky over your head and you’d think, “That’s the brightest, most beautiful astrocytoma I’ve ever seen.”
And it would be.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
“Astrid. Astrid.”
I blink. There are tiny bursts of light swimming at the corners of my vision. My astrocytoma.
An astrocytoma is not, in fact, a shooting star, though it should be. It’s a brain tumor, made of star-shaped cells. Astrocytes. Things of beauty, and instruments of death.
I blink again and my mother comes into view in front of me. She was sitting next to me a minute ago, and now she’s hovering over me, her face too close to mine. “Astrid?”
Yes, my tumor matches my name.
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear Dr. Klein?”
My mother’s face is splotchy. Her eyes are rimmed in red. I look from her to Dr. Klein, who’s giving me her Serious Face.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Dr. Klein says, clearing her throat. “I wish I had better news.”
Poor Dr. Klein. I shouldn’t be thinking about her feelings right now, but I am. Dr. Klein likes me. She already saved me once, when my brain first got tumored. Ninth grade. There was the surgery to remove it, and then the radiation, and then the chemo. It took nine months — my mother likes to say it took the same amount of time to start my life as it did to save it — and then everything looked good for a while. Like, doesn’t-happen-that-often, almost-enough-to-make-you- believe-in-God good.
I don’t believe in God, though. I believe in science, and there’s a reason for that. Science is a kind of miraculous thing of its own, miraculous enough to make a star-shaped tumor go away for two years, which a lot of people said was impossible. But science is also reality, and it can only do what it can do. And now, according to the scan we’re all staring at on Dr. Klein’s computer screen, science has run up against its natural limitations.
That’s my brain on the scan. My brain, the traffic control center of everything that makes me me. Just staring back at us in all its light and shadows. It never gets old, looking at a human brain.
Dr. Klein swallows. “Astrid, you know how to read this scan. I don’t need to tell you what it says.”
She’s correct. The thing Dr. Klein did, besides saving me the first time, was make me love the brain — which, if you think about it, was pretty badass of her, considering that I had only recently come face-to-face with my own brain’s potentially fatal flaws. She let me do an internship in her lab this past summer, and since my hair had mostly grown back by then, no one in the office knew I’d been one of her cancer kids just a year earlier. I was just a high school student with an interest in neuroscience, and she let me look under the microscope at slivers of normal and abnormal brain tissue, at scans just like this one, for patients with all kinds of astrocytomas and gliomas and medulloblastomas.
So she’s right — I can read this scan. And it is not a good one. There’s my brain, both hemispheres, and right there at the base of the brain stem, a foreign object of my body’s own making: a jellyfish, a bubble floating away from a child’s liquid-coated wand, a bright asteroid. A tumor made of stars.
Title Fear of Missing Out
Author Kate McGovern
Pages 320 Pages
Intended Target Audience Young Adult
Genre Contemporary
To Be Published March 19th 2019 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon.com ● Chapters ● The Book Depository
Everyone has a fear of missing out on something ― a party, a basketball game, a hangout after school. But what if it’s life that you’ll be missing out on?
When Astrid learns that her cancer has returned, she hears about a radical technology called cryopreservation that may allow her to have her body frozen until a future time when ― and if ― a cure is available. With her boyfriend, Mohit, and her best friend, Chloe, Astrid goes on a road trip in search of that possibility. To see if it’s real. To see if it’s worth it. For fear of missing out on everything.
As an extra, exciting bonus, Kate has been kind enough to offer one lucky reader the opportunity to win both a signed hardcover copy of her debut novel, Rules For 50/50 Chances, and an advance reader copy of Fear of Missing Out! One winner will be chosen at random at the conclusion of the giveaway and the prize will be distributed by Kate when ARCs become available. Please fill out the Rafflecopter form below to enter!
