At school the next day, Lauren tells Zoe that Max took a picture of Zoe’s bare chest that has been spread around school. Zoe and Max make out in Max’s room, during which Zoe’s blouse comes off. As Zoe looks for the boy, she runs into Max Morgan. Inside the party, Zoe sees the same boy but again loses him in the crowd. Before entering the party, Zoe chats with an older boy whose name she fails to learn before her best friend, Lauren, pulls her away. Zoe knows Jane won’t allow her to go, so she asks Simon instead, who grants her permission. Zoe is invited to a summertime party by the popular schoolboy Max Morgan. Zoe can’t understand why her parents argue so much but slowly comes to realize it has something to do with Jane begrudging Simon’s ill father. Zoe lives with her argumentative parents, Jane and Simon, as well as her ten-year-old sister, Sophie, and deaf six-year-old sister, Dorothy (Dot). Zoe has a dark secret she cannot tell anyone she knows, so she begins sending letters to Stuart Harris in America, confessing her dark secret. A fifteen-year-old girl calls herself Zoe to protect her true identity, claiming to live on 1 Fiction Road. Told through a series of letters addressed to Stuart Harris, an American on Death Row for murdering his wife, the story begins in 2012 in England. Ketchup Clouds won the 2013 Waterstone Children’s Book Prize, was named a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, and was nominated for the 2014 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Young Adult Fiction. Through her relationship with her family, Zoe learns to put the past behind her and start anew.

As Zoe opens up about her troubled past, she begins dealing with her sense of guilt, grief, and remorse over what happened to her one fateful summer night. Told through a series of letters written by a British fifteen-year-old who calls herself Zoe, the story follows Zoe’s pen-pal relationship with an American murderer on Death Row, whom she believes is the only person she can share her darkest secret with. Ketchup Clouds (2012) is an epistolary, young-adult novel by British author Annabel Pitcher.

Ketchup clouds book