Melt (The Rough Romance Trilogy Book 1)

Winner of the IndieReader Discovery Award and the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators Spark Award

"A fresh, emotionally complex bildungsroman of young American love that looks long and hard at violence, and at what can overcome it."-Kirkus Reviews

Set against the backdrop of The Wizard of Oz, this tale is both a chilling story of abuse and a timeless teen romance.

Sixteen-year-old good girl Dorothy just blew into the small town of Highland Park—where the social headquarters is Munchkinland (Dunkin’ Donuts). There, she meets Joey—a bad boy who tells no one about the catastrophic domestic violence he witnesses at home.

He had the look of an animal caught in a trap. It was like he was caged inside that beautiful body, like he was asking me to carve deeper and set his soul free.


Can these two lovers survive peer pressure, Joey’s reputation, and his alcoholism? And then there’s his family secret which is about to be unleashed.

Joey's words are scattered on the page—reflecting his broken state.


She looks like a
doll
like one of them
porcelain
dolls something so
fragile and
precious
you should put
high
on
a
shelf to keep
safe and never
never
touch.


Dorothy is the voice of reason—until something so shattering happens that she, too, may lose her grip.

he's
got
a
gun
oh
god he's gonna kill us

Can their love endure, or will it melt away?


Drawing from true events, this brutal love story will hit like a punch in the face and is sure to reach into the soul of every reader.

"Dorothy and Joey’s plight is both an inner and an outer struggle, a reckoning with a cold world, and a psychological drama about the stakes of truth-telling..."-Kirkus Reviews

"Selene Castrovilla is a writer worth watching."-Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner