Hello, people of the Internet. Let it be known that today, 9/5/Y2K, my legal guardian Brian finally joined the modern world and connected our computer to the great World Wide Web.
In the early 2000s, from a dial-up connection in a Western New York suburb, sixteen-year-old Ellora Gao logs on to the Internet to start a secret LiveJournal. Abandoned as a child by her troubled mother and left with her former stepfather Brian, an emotionally distant alcoholic, Ellora hopes to find the close relationships online that are missing from her real life.
But her online diary isn’t entirely serious, it’s also where she can gossip and rant about music, books, and everyone at her high school, including two new intriguing friends, Alice, a reformed bad girl, and Tiff, a cocky musical prodigy. As the school year unfolds, Ellora shares every challenge she faces with her growing LiveJournal readership: memories of her estranged mother, frustration with Brian's lack of parenting, concern for Alice’s health, romantic feelings for Tiff, and her place in a post-Y2K world on the cusp of major change.
“If one is very fortunate, a few books will fundamentally change their life. Such is the case for me and LOG OFF, an indelibly wise coming-of-age story crackling with humor and nostalgia. Felicetti will heal you, delight you, and make you want to hug your younger self; Log Off is an instant classic, a heartbreaker and a balm, and we’re all the luckier for it.”
—T Kira Māhealani Madden, author of
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
LOG OFF, The debut novel by Kristen Felicetti
Coming June 4th, 2024
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“So, why are you on my computer all the time?”
I wasn’t going to tell him about LiveJournal. I didn’t think he would care enough to try and read it, but telling anyone about having any kind of diary is basically asking for them to read it at some point.
So, I chose my words carefully and said, “I’m... part of a growing online writing community.”
Brian sipped his coffee. “What the hell does that mean?”
I shrugged and continued eating home fries.
“Writing what?” he asked. “Who exactly are you writing to?”
“Other girls. A few boys.”
“How do you know they’re who they say they are? They could be fifty-year-old men.”
“They’re not.”
“How do you know? People can say they’re whoever they want to be on the Internet.”
“Only a fellow teenage girl would be able to write the way I do.”
He considered this. “Yeah, I still don’t like it. Don’t give out any personal information. Don’t tell anyone where we live.”
"LOG OFF is a time machine, brilliantly evoking the Y2K era in all its LiveJournal glory. Kristen Felicetti's prose feels as real and intimate as making a friend on the internet for the very first time and finding the key to her diary—I loved it."
—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
“A brilliant and inventive debut with an unforgettable voice. Kristen Felicetti’s writing is so off-handedly wise and instructive, I couldn’t help but think of LOG OFF as a survival manual and by the end of my reading all other survival manuals were now obsolete.”
—Bud Smith, author of Teenager
Kristen Felicetti is a writer and the founding editor-in-chief of The Bushwick Review. She lives primarily in Rochester, NY and travels often. LOG OFF is her first book.
Cover illustration by Jinhwa Jang
Cover design by Tim Vienckowski
ISBN: 978-1-7379242-5-8
Retail price: $19
