Never Ever

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Wylie Dalton didn’t believe in fairy tales or love at first sight. Then she met a real-life Peter Pan. 

When Wylie encounters Phinn—confident, mature, and devastatingly handsome—at a party the night before her brother goes to juvie, she can’t believe how fast she falls for him. And that’s before he shows her how to fly. Soon Wylie and her brothers find themselves whisked away to a mysterious tropical island off the coast of New York City where nobody ages beyond seventeen and life is a constant party. Wylie’s in heaven: now her brother won’t go to jail and she can escape her over-scheduled life with all its woes and responsibilities—permanently. But the deeper Wylie falls for Phinn, the more she begins to discover has been kept from her and her brothers. Somebody on the island has been lying to her, but the truth can’t stay hidden forever.

Release date: June 21, 2016

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 352

Sample

Phinn held his pint glass up for a toast, and everyone followed suit.

“Splash!” he declared.

“Splash!” everyone echoed loudly. The Daltons smiled politely and wordlessly clinked their glasses.

“You say ‘cheers’ on the mainland. Splash is the term we use around these parts,” Phinn translated.

“Oh, got it. Splash, everyone!” Wylie replied, awkwardly lifting her glass again.

For a few minutes, no one spoke as they devoured their dinner. Wylie doused her shrimp with the green dip and took a bite. The sauce tasted like lime and avocado, and the shrimp was so fresh, she could barely stop herself from moaning in delight. She washed it down with a sip of coconut milk that tasted sweeter than the canned kind she cooked with back home.

“Wylie,” Phinn said, “How old are you?”

Wylie, mouth full, swallowed her food quickly and nearly choked on it. “I turned seventeen yesterday, actually,” she answered.

“And Joshua, what about you?”

“Sixteen,” Joshua answered. Phinn gestured to Micah to answer.

“Fifteen,” he said, and then with a glance to Tinka, “but people think I’m a lot older.”

Phinn replied, “The people in this room tonight are members of what I like to call my inner circle. They’re the people I trust most in the world.” Wylie felt her stomach flip. It shouldn’t have mattered, but she hated the idea of Tinka being that important to Phinn.

“How old are you guys?” Phinn asked the rest of the party. They answered in unison:

“Seventeen.”

“And when will each of you turn eighteen?”

Again, they responded at the same time:

“Never.”