"Jennifer Marra has created her own story in a brilliant first novel ... It brings alive the atmosphere of the traveling circus that was the scene as well as the inner lives of her characters." - Dennis McNally, Author of A Long Strange Trip
In 1987, nobody called it "adulting" - but it sucked just the same.
Samantha Ryan is a prodigy with a Columbia Engineering degree at nineteen and a coveted job at Bell Labs. But brilliance doesn't cure loneliness or silence the social anxiety that leaves her tongue-tied among older coworkers.
Too proud to ask for help, she makes costly mistakes. Pushing the wrong button crashes hundreds of servers, earning her colleagues' wrath. Another blunder - mishandling floppy disks - corrupts vital data and threatens to derail her master's degree, a requirement for keeping her job.
Desperate for escape, Sam turns to old comforts: Liz, her loyal roommate, and Nate, her mercurial ex, for a weekend away. The Grateful Dead are on tour, the drugs are plentiful, and Sam reconnects with Nate.
But every high has a crash. By the weekend's end, Sam has lost both her boyfriend and her best friend. It's time she learned to engineer her own life - but can Sam rebuild before she self-destructs for good?
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"If you appreciate character-driven fiction, stories about friendship, music, and 80s nostalgia you will find much to enjoy about this coming-of-age story." - DBN Magazine by Digital Book Nook
"The Days Between is rooted in a particular time and place that will enchant readers with nostalgia, but at its core, it is a timeless coming-of-age story, rife with universal themes of love, friendship, loss, and identity. Anyone with a soul will appreciate this story and relate to its tender-hearted protagonist. It is a perfect "sugar magnolia." -Halle Aten, Psychologist and Author