The Flywheel (Erin Gough, Hardie Grant Egmont)

Between running her father’s struggling café while he takes a well-earned holiday, dodging mean girls at school and helping her best friend with his girl dramas, Del is seriously in over her head. Even spying on the beautiful Rosa isn’t enough to distract her from her problems. So when things take a turn for the worse at the café, something has to give. Funny, clever and highly entertaining, The Flywheel features the kind of teenage dramatics that readers will love. Del isn’t the most likable of narrators—she’s dramatic and whiney and acts without thinking—but her development over the course of the novel is wonderful to watch, and her slowly growing romance with Rosa is a delightful, complicated mess. While the situation that Del is placed in—a 17-year-old running a business with no adult supervision—is a little far-fetched, her actions and reactions are totally believable. Erin Gough’s Ampersand Project-winning debut novel will appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen and fellow Ampersand Project winner Melissa Keil.

Meg Whelan is the children’s book buyer at the Hill of Content Bookshop in Melbourne