Barbara Dee: Hi. This is Barbara Dee. I'm the author of Star-Crossed. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll share an excerpt with you.

A few years ago, my teenage daughter came out to me and it was a surprise and it reminded me about how I felt when I was in middle school and I realized that I'd always had crushes on boys. All of a sudden, I had a crush on my best friend who was a girl. It was a very confusing experience for me, and I felt like I couldn't talk about it to my friends or my family.

When my daughter came out, I started to wonder how different it felt for middle schoolers these days if they were wondering about themselves in that way. I wanted to write a book about that, but I wanted it to be a really happy, positive story, and I wanted it to be a comedy because just because you're going through something like that, just because you're asking serious questions about yourself, it doesn't mean that the story has to be sad or serious. It could be positive and affirmative and funny.

And now I'm going to read a little excerpt to you. This is in the voice of Maddie, who is an eighth grader.

"That afternoon, when I got home from Verona's and locked myself in my bedroom to read Romeo and Juliet, something happened to me. It was kind of a thunderbolt, I guess you could call it. Because as I was reading, I stared speaking the words out loud, feeling the characters' emotions as if they were mine. I didn't understand every word, and a few times I skimmed when certain characters got speechy. But the idea that Romeo and Juliet had a secret love they had to hide from their families, even from their best friends ... It was a story so real I could almost see it happening in front of me.

And when I got to the end, when Juliet discovers that Romeo is dead, and kisses his lips, and they're still warm, I did the whole scene in front of the mirror, including the kiss. My eyes had actual tears, and I thought, 'It's like this play is happening to me. Inside me.' I wanted to own it. I wanted to eat it, as if it were chocolate layer cake."