Fan CastingFoster Dade Explores the Cosmos

WHEN FOSTER DADE ARRIVES AT Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 9008. Barack Obama begins his first term as pres-ident; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging. A transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents' scandalous divorce. He soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of Kennedy's social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and polities of the carelessly entitled. But eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster's old dorm room, he begins an epic yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interviews with former classmates, Foster's blog posts, playlists, and text archives, and the narrator's own obsessive imagination, a story unfurls- of privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and how we forge the mythologies that give meaning to our lives.