Punk 57

Punk 57 is a standalone new adult romance by Penelope Douglas, published independently in 2016. This book takes an interest in teenagers who are performing a version of themselves for an audience, and it places the performance at the centre of the story. The letters between the two leads begin in primary school and run for years, which gives the novel a long history behind a story that takes place inside a single school year.

Ryen is the girl the school expects her to be: popular, pointed, careful about which friends she is seen with, and more or less maintaining that image for her mother as much as for anyone else. Misha is the boy who has been writing back since they were children and who has been forced to move to her town. When they meet without names, he chooses to stay anonymous. The letters keep arriving while the two of them circle each other at close range, and the novel alternates so the reader knows exactly how much each of them is hiding, which is the engine of the whole book.

Douglas writes the relationship as a conflict between a private honesty and a public reputation, and the school setting supplies the pressure: cliques, a mother with opinions about status, a friend group that requires maintenance. The novel is the author's best-known standalone and belongs to the same period of her work as the Devil's Night series; it contains strong language and explicit sex, and the letters are the part of the book readers most often quote.