An Otherwise Perfect Plan is a fiercely intelligent, introspective, and laugh-out-loud funny young adult novel of self-discovery, narrated by a quirky teenage girl as she embarks on an unpredictable and often hilarious quest to find the father she's never known, unravel the mystery of her mom's silence on the subject, and achieve the impossible: actually understanding her own unruly emotions.

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Gwen Pendergrass has a problem.

Well, a whole bunch if you really want to start counting, but then again, what sixteen-year-old doesn't?

Her latest is an assignment in English class to write a paper on her earliest memory of her father, only she's got zip. Nada. Absolutely none at all.

She strongly suspects this is due to never having actually met the man. In fact, the only presence he's had in her life is as a face in a strip of photobooth photos taken in Las Vegas during "The Weekend She Was Made" (ew....!) In them, he and her mom look really happy, and kind of drunk, which Gwen figures explains a lot. Or, if not a lot, at least her birth nine months later.

Aside from showing her the photo strip, Gwen's Mom has flat out refused to tell Gwen anything about him, not even his name, leaving Gwen with an enduring mystery that she's worried like a loose tooth. Though without the shiny dollar coin that the tooth would bring at the end.

All this changes when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to alter the course of their lives falls into Gwen's mom's lap. But nothing is ever simple with Gwen, and she has to rope her best friend Peter into a wild, Hail Mary of a plan to find her long-lost dad to ensure that nothing stands in the way of her mom reclaiming her future.

What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out, just about everything, and she soon finds herself racing against time to succeed before her mom figures out what she's doing, her head explodes, or it all spirals completely out of control.