Love in the Time of Cynicism

Senior year is supposed to be full of college applications and succumbing to the wishes of well-meaning but most likely soulless parents, but the radically un-ambitious, coffee supremacist protagonist of Love in the Time of Cynicism doesn’t want any of that. Despite being blessed with a quick wit and sharp tongue, Cordelia-called-Del can’t manage to find her voice until poetically driven and shockingly flirtatious Rhett Tressler worms his way into her life. That’s when everything changes.
Cordelia Kane, named by a mother clearly out to get her, is a New York heart trapped in a soul-sucking, altogether too white suburban Texas town living what only the most generous would call a half life. For years, she’s suffered through shifts at a local coffeehouse, bowing to the whims and wishes of people she can’t stand for money she doesn’t need. Until she meets the greatest oxymoron of her life at the start of her Senior year: Rhett Tressler, who wears a leather jacket and drives a motorcycle but spends afternoons reading the collected works of Sylvia Plath. Through exchanging the art of sarcasm, dissecting the brilliance of The Breakfast Club, sharing the secrets of their surprisingly broken pasts, and finding out what makes their suburban town worth living in, they find the sort of love nobody gives teenagers credit for.