Call me Gene Miller. Polukarov D.

Teenager N Series
Publisher KompasGid
328 pages
Binding Hardcover
Age 12–16 years
Format 60x90/16 (145x215 mm, standard)
ISBN 978-5-00083-742-9
Weight 492 g

Zhenya Vyssotskaya, a tenth-grader, is an utterly uninteresting person. Her classmates and parents tell her this without mincing words. Her daughter is a real disappointment, not at all a creative person. Zhenya knows this herself. Unexpectedly, she becomes an unwitting witness to strange events: the younger brother of one of her classmates hands a package containing something red to a stranger. The next day, the school is abuzz with talk of the missing red Converse sneakers belonging to one of the seventh graders. What did Zhenya see? A theft? A prank? Or something far more serious—something that could lead to serious consequences even for an accidental witness?

Darya Polukharova (born in 1991) is the author of several novels about teenagers and those who have just gone through the turbulent transition to adulthood. She has a deep understanding of problems similar to those faced by the characters in Tamara Mikheeva's "Yanka" or Yulia Kuznetsova's "My First Job". In 2019, the novella "Call Me Jean Miller" became a finalist in the "Teenager N" literary competition organized by KompasGid Publishing House in collaboration with the Labirint online bookstore.

For middle school age.