Tell Me Three Things

Tell Me Three Things is Julie Buxbaum's first young adult novel, published in 2017. Sixteen-year-old Jessie Holmes narrates this contemporary story in real-time over the course of two months, as she navigates the daunting halls of a new high school, a life without her mother, and anonymous messages from a classmate. Buxbaum intersperses Jessie's narration with digital conversations in the forms of text messages, emails, and instant messages (IMs), adding a modern epistolary element to the story. 

Plot Summary

Jessie receives her first anonymous email from a classmate calling himself “Somebody Nobody” a week into her junior year at Wood Valley High School. She is new to Los Angeles, having just moved from Chicago with her father, Bill, after he married a woman named Rachel from his online bereavement group. It has hardly been two years since they lost Jessie's mother to cancer, and Jessie is still entrenched enough in her grief that she feels relatively numb to all the upheaval in her life. Somebody Nobody (SN) initially offers to be her virtual guide at Wood Valley, giving Jessie practical advice, but their relationship quickly evolves into a deep friendship that Jessie comes to rely on as she adjusts to her new life.