An Otherwise Perfect Plan is a laugh-out loud contemporary YA, coming-of-age story told in the first person by the sixteen-year-old Gwen Pendergrass--and don't get her started on the baggage that last name comes with--a thoroughly unreliable narrator who tries to make sense of her world by weaving in everything from the business plan to building Stonehenge, to why physics makes it so difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Her riffs on life, modern society, and the virtues of several kinds of chocolate take her and us on a journey of discovery, both through the mystery of who her father was, along with the mysteries of her own emotions, proving once again that the journey can BE the destination. ------------------------------------------ It had always been just Gwen and her Mom, and Gwen had always been mostly fine with that. That is, until she learned how much her mom had given up in order to raise her alone. When a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes along for her mom to reinvent herself and get her life back on the track she’s been on prior to Gwen’s unplanned birth, Gwen becomes determined to find her father and give back to her Mom the life she’d always planned for herself. With nothing more than a photobooth film strip of her Mom and the guy she’s always been told was her dad to go on, she finds help in the most unlikely of places, a bored private detective whose office is a Jewish Delicatessen, a Vice Principal whose secret Demotivational Poster features a Star Wars Storm Trouper sitting dejected in a bar with the title FAILURE: Those were the droids you were looking for, and of course, her best friend Peter, who introduces her to the novel idea of sending a postcard. At times poignant, heartbreaking and joyously absurd, Gwen’s story is ultimately about a young woman trying to understand her past, her present, and how it and the people in it will all fit together in the future she’s creating.