Jonathan Friesen is author of the award-winning Jerk, California, a heart-warming YA novel about a young man struggling with Tourette’s Syndrome which won the 2009 ALA Schneider Award for “Best Book for Teens.” In addition, he is a frequent contributor to Clubhouse magazine, twice winning the EPA Excellence Award for middle grade short stories published in Clubhouse. Because of his fourteen years’ experience teaching fifth grade in public schools, he has numerous opportunities to speak to in elementary, middle, and high schools across the country, as well as in public libraries to groups of patrons and librarians. He is also a frequent speaker at educator conferences, home school conferences (connecting to over two million children nationwide), national writers’ conferences, mental health conferences, school district events, and to parent groups across the country on issues of ostracism and empowerment. He maintains an active website, blog, and newsletter database, and is a personal online writing coach for gifted young novelists across the country. He and his wife live on a horse farm in Minnesota with their three children and a growing number of animals.
about BOTH OF ME
It was supposed to be just another flight, another escape into a foreign place where she could forget her past, forget her attachments. Until Clara found herself seated next to an alluring boy named Elias Phinn—a boy who seems to know secrets she has barely been able to admit to herself for years.
When her carry-on bag is accidentally switched with Elias’s identical pack, Clara uses the luggage tag to track down her things. At that address she discovers there is not one Elias Phinn, but two: the odd, paranoid, artistic, and often angry Elias she met on the plane, who lives in an imaginary world of his own making called Salem; and the kind, sweet, and soon irresistible Elias who greets her at the door, and who has no recollection of ever meeting Clara at all. As she learns of Elias’s dissociative identity disorder, and finds herself quickly entangled in both of Elias’s lives, Clara makes a decision that could change all of them forever. She is going to find out what the Salem Elias knows about her past, and how, even if it means playing along with his otherworldly quest. And she is going to find a way to keep the gentle Elias she’s beginning to love from ever disappearing again.