Joel’s new job at the video store is just what the therapist

ordered. But what happens if the first true friend he’s

made in years finds out about What Was Wrong With Him?

LISABETH POSTHUMA

It’s been two years since Joel last experienced What Was
Wrong With Him and eight years since The Bad Thing
Happened. Now Joel is seventeen and seemingly “normal,”
with a new prescription from his therapist: a part-time job.
Joel finds work at the local video store amid a motley crew
of young people who each answer to a movie character
name (Scarlet from Gone with the Wind, Poppins for Mary
Poppins, The Godfather, Hannibal—you get the idea).
It’s a fresh start, and at ROYO Video Joel (who goes by
Solo, after Han Solo) works to keep his tabula rasa while
climbing the not-so-corporate ladder. Soon he befriends
rough-around-the-edges Baby (from Dirty Dancing, but
don’t even joke about putting her in a corner), a prickly
girl with terrific taste in movies. As circumstances throw
Baby and Solo together, Joel realizes that for the first time
in nearly a decade, he has a chance to make a real friend—
one who wouldn’t land him back in the psychiatric ward.
But as Baby pushes for Joel to open up to her, he starts
to wonder if their friendship can possibly survive the
devastating truths from his past. Set in a pop-culture-rich
1990s, this remarkable story tackles challenging and timely
themes with huge doses of wit, power, and heart. ON SALE MAY 11, 2021
HC: 978-1-5362-1303-4
$19.99 ($25.99 CAN)
LISABETH POSTHUMA is a devotee of obscure documentaries
Also available as an e-book
about drive-ins, a lover of rotary telephones, and a trophy-winning Age 14 and up · 416 pages
champion of TV trivia. She lives in Michigan with her two parakeets,
Tiki Bon Jovi and Alaska Riggins.
A Note from Lisabeth Posthuma
Baby & Solo is a work of fiction set in the 1990s, which is a decade that in retrospect
feels fictional itself. It was a time before smartphones and social media when there was
a mainstream of popular culture most everyone experienced together. If you came of
age in the nineties, you likely did so while watching Friends, speaking fluent MTV, and
spending at least one night each weekend scouring the shelves of your local video store.

Like a lot of nineties kids, I had an after-school job at such a place. Though the video
department of the now-defunct Summit Ridge Pharmacy in Smalltown, Indiana, wasn’t
nearly as hip as ROYO Video, I still loved it for the same reason that my narrator, Joel
“Solo” Teague, loves his job: the people. The ensemble cast of coworkers at my video store
was completely different from those at Joel’s (though, like his, we also had pretty cool
nicknames), but mine was also a group of interesting misfits in their own right, who were
all going through that fleeting, blurry end-of-childhood-beginning-of-adulthood stage of
life together.

I have so many standout memories from that job. Like the time the stock boy held my
hair while I threw up in the bushes because I didn’t know you shouldn’t come directly to
work after having your wisdom teeth removed (lesson learned!). Or how my coworker Big
Mama (who was neither big nor a mother) was convinced all movie titles could be porno
titles if you said them a certain way (my favorite illustration of this was the 1950 Lucille
Ball and Bob Hope classic Fancy Pants). We’d bond over gripes about customers not
rewinding tapes and how lame it was that our manager wouldn’t let us display the poster
for American Beauty because someone’s bare stomach was too risqué in our conservative
town. We’d challenge one another to memorize all catalog numbers assigned to the
movies in our database system. (I was undefeated. Clueless: 4769! Waterworld: 4788!) This
job was the best. So it only made sense that when I was searching for the perfect setting to
tell the tale of Joel and Nicole’s unique friendship, it would turn out to be a video rental
store in 1996.

There’s something both terrifying and liberating about those late teen years, when the ties
that have always bound us to our families begin to fray. It’s the first time we realize that
we have to look backward to understand the present and that we aren’t who we are by
chance or by choice. The relationships formed during this stage are so unique: they can
be as intense as they are fragile, as completely desperate as they are entirely comfortable.
Baby & Solo is a story of the kind of messy, passionate friendship that emerges from this
crossroads, the kind of friendship that’s worth the risk because of what it teaches you
about love and acceptance, not just for each other but also for yourself.