Told through a collage of letters, emails and clippings, LOVE FROM THE FUNNY FARM is a thoughtful, nuanced story about identity, sex, friendship, and the bridges we cross (and burn) as we grow into ourselves

LOVE FROM THE FUNNY FARM
by Jenny Fran Davis
St. Martin’s Press, Spring 2017

Flora Goldwasser is private school perfection—all wrapped up in a vintage Grace Kelly dress. But when she leaves elite Manhattan for an academy of unwashed hippies and ironic hipsters in the Hudson Valley, Flora discovers that when it comes to popularity and approval there is no commutative property. Her love of Maison Kayser pastries, perfect French conjugation, Jackie Kennedy sunglasses, and Audrey Hepburn movies make her the ultimate outsider in a land of kale, quinoa, and tattered tunics… A budding Marxist, a bipolar Quebecois, and a jacked dude named Agnes come together with a vending machine full of vintage accessories as Flora throws off the mantle of expectations, assumptions, and perfection—the trappings of her old life. A mix of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, this is an offbeat, modern YA novel with emotionally rich and compelling characters.

Jenny Fran Davis is a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, which gives her writing a wonderful “boots-on-the-ground” quality as she handles friendships, modern hook-up culture, and the pressures of high school. She is the recipient of the 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards’ National Gold Medal for novels. Last summer, she was awarded a full scholarship to the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference based on an excerpt from LOVE FROM THE FUNNY FARM.