Publisher’s Description of Friend Me

What happens when an online friend becomes a real-life nightmare?

Roisin hasn’t made a single friend since moving from Ireland to Massachusetts. In fact, she is falling apart under constant abuse from a school bully, Zara. Zara torments Roisin in person and on social media. She makes Roisin the laughingstock of the whole school.

Roisin feels utterly alone… until she bonds with Haley online. Finally there’s someone who gets her. Haley is smart, strong, and shares anti-mean-girl memes that make Roisin laugh. Together, they are able to imagine what life could look like without Zara. Haley quickly becomes Roisin’s lifeline.

Then Zara has a painful accident, police investigate, and Roisin panics. Could her chats with Haley look incriminating?

Roisin wants Haley to delete her copies of their messages, but when she tries to meet Haley in person, she can’t find her anywhere. What’s going on? Her best friend would never have lied to her, right? Or is Haley not who she says she is…

With twists, turns, and lightning-fast pacing, this is a middle-grade thriller about bullying, revenge, and tech that young readers won’t be able to put down.

Rebecca’s Thoughts on Friend Me

Friend Me is a story about online bullying that provides tweens with a much-needed window into how they can protect themselves and reach out for help.

Roisin struggles to find friends and her “new normal” after her move. When a bully posts humiliating pictures of her online, finding any sense of normal seems impossible.

Roisin’s story morphs from a contemporary warning about the risks of social media to a fast-paced thriller when Rosin’s bully, Zara, has a dreadful accident and almost dies. And Roisin’s phone shows she had motive for causing the accident. If she can’t find the real culprit, she could fall under suspicion.

The threat of online conversations being exposed and used against you is all too real with the way teens (and in fact, everyone) speaks freely on social media today. It made me think twice about what I say in private online forums and texts.

As someone who has moved between countries, I also connected with Roisin’s search for friendship at the start of the story. I think anyone who has moved and found themselves feeling dislocated and alone could connect with her.

But her worries about who Haley is and how to find her are also sobering.

Friend Me  has pitch-perfect middle grade voice and will resonate with anyone who has worried about their most embarrassing moment being caught on video and uploaded on social media, anyone who worries they’ve said too much in online chats, and/or anyone who has put too much trust into someone they only know online.

Highly recommended.

Interview with Sheila Averbuch

What was your inspiration for Friend Me?

A walked into my son’s bedroom one day and he was on his smartphone. He mentioned it was his friend’s birthday and I suggested he ring him and he was like. . . what? No! Why would I do that?

Young people have phones but they seldom use them to make phone calls. I realized it would be possible to have an entire relationship with someone through your phone because the default for communication has become texts and social media.

That made me think about a main character whose best friend was someone she knew only through her phone. This main character would be so dependent on this online friend that they focused on that relationship to the exclusion of other people in her life.

Who would this online friend be?

That’s where the concept of the story came from.

Friend Me is part contemporary & part thriller. Did you intend for it to be both? Or start with one genre and stumble into the other as you wrote?

At the same time the concept of a close friend who Roisin only knew online came to me, the core twist in the novel also did. I don’t want to spoil the big twist but I can say that’s when I realized the story would start as a contemporary novel, but it would escalate into a thriller.

At that point, I started brainstorming red herrings I could plant throughout the store and more twists I could add in. Some of my favorite books have huge reversals that create important moments in the story, like Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. I knew I wanted to write something like that.

You’ve moved overseas to Scotland from the US as an adult – a move that goes in the opposite direction of Roisin’s. How much did that shape this story? Why did you move Roisin to the US from Ireland instead of the other way around?

My move helped me put myself in Roisin’s shoes, to describe the feeling of being different. I think this feeling can arise after any move but it’s particularly big after an international move. You dress differently than the people around you. You smell different. You use different words when you speak. It’s all a bit isolating.

But I set the story in America because the middle grade me is still in America. When I put myself in Roisin’s shoes, it felt like the right place to be. I’ve written other middle grade manuscripts — 2 set in space and one set in Scotland. But for this book, America felt right.

The main character’s mother works in an artificial intelligence lab. What kind of research did that require? How much of the tech is real versus science fiction?

I did a lot of research into AI. One of the most fascinating things I found was therapeutic robots. They are robotics pets — cats, for instance — that the sick or elderly who may be isolated from real pets can hold. They’re able to pet them and get a sense of well-being similar to cuddling a real pet.

Therapeutic robots are real, and when Roisin has an awful day and feels that her older brother doesn’t understand her at the beginning of the book, she retreats into her bedroom and is confronted by her family’s therapeutic cat. She finds the cat eerie rather than comforting and it makes her feel even more friendless.

I was so fascinated by these robots that I bought one and I have a video of me interacting with it.

There’s a theme that grew from this and made its way into Friend Me. Technology can sometimes be isolating, such as when people interact with their phones rather than the people around them.

Yet it can also enable relationships, such as when you connect with online friends or with robotic pets. Some people take comfort from robotic pets, though Roisin’s not one of them! 🙂

What was the hardest thing about writing this story?

The hardest part was keeping the reader guessing all the way to the end of the story! It took a lot of red herrings and hints at alternative potential villains.

Rebecca: You had me guessing all the way to the end!

What messages do you want readers to take away after reading Friend Me?

I want kids to know they can and should speak up if they’re attacked by online bullies. They shouldn’t just speak up once, but keep speaking up until someone listens to them and helps.

Stopbullying.gov has superb resources that show young people what they can do about cyberbullying.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another middle grade techno-thriller. This one has to do with selfie culture and how self-conscious it makes us.

What advice do you have for aspiring Kidlit writers?

Read. Read voraciously. Read within your genre and outside of it as well.

Request books from your library. You don’t have to buy everything yourself.

And take advantage of any opportunity for 1-on-1 contact with agents. Connecting with agents is more difficult now with the COVID virus keeping us apart, but the advice of agents is like gold dust and you need to gather it up until you’re able to break through and get your start in publishing.

Many thanks to Sheila for visiting the Winged Pen today to talk to us about Friend Me and her process for writing it! You can find out more about Sheila and Friend Me on her website, Sheilamaverbuch.com.

I received a free arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Friend Me will be released on November 10, 2020. You can check it out on Goodreads, or pre-order via Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. Sheila notes: Support your local indie bookstores! And order early! Indie stores will need more time than you think to fill holiday-season orders this year!

If Friend Me sounds like a book you’d like, you might be interested in other middle grade books we’ve reviewed on the Winged Pen:

Midsummer’s Mayhem by Rajani LaRocca
10 Great Middle Grade Reads for Self-Quarantine
Some Places More Than Others by Renée Watson