That's what the t-shirts that will appear on this website in a few days will ask. (The t-shirts are for girls. There are hats for guys; and they're good, too.)

Though they'll refer to my upcoming book, NOW YOU SEE HER.

But the question is real. And it's real for many young people.

You might think my publisher and I are devoting a great deal of attention to a book about a 15-year-old who fakes her own abduction. After all, she doesn't even do a school shooting!

But I think that kids like Hope Shay are far, far more common than we think. They are born and they are made, by this culture and by parents who want them desperately to succeed.

Hope's are parents who care -- too much.

Their daughter is so talented and savvy and smart it seems she's as invulnerable as she acts. In fact, Hope is very, very vulnerable indeed. She's both utterly charming and deeply, almost pathologically insecure, she is ... not too very different from many successful kids.

You might know kids like this. You might have kids like this. You might be one.

The world seems to treat kids as sophisticated, knowing, with a tough veneer -- so much so we almost begin to believe it. And this is how Hope is. Tough. In the know. The girl with everything.

But not really.

She's a trained actor. And it's a big act.

She has what appear to be the dream parents, who notice her talents and gifts, who nurture them and her, who listen, who are there for her. But there's such a thing as noticing overly often, caring too much, getting your heart and mind too tangled up in your child's stuff. Every kid who's had a parent like this knows what I mean.

Every parent who's been a parent like this knows what I mean. For I've been that kind of parent, too.

I'm not sure who'll get the t-shirts and hats (they've been vetted for having the right shape, being non-humiliating and minimally invasive by the "right" kind of kids) or how.

But I want them to draw attention to a different kind of teen book, one that's not so obviously about a social problem, such as date rape or drugs or crime or parents who are drunks or addicts or abusive or even vampires. Hope's parents, and Hope, are just a bubble to the left of ordinary. But what they do, all with best intentions, may be just as hurtful.

And Hope...well, because of all the attention she receives, feels she has to perform, to give more, to be more, to want more. Finally she doesn't know where her parents end and she begins.

In fact, the young woman who is "being Hope" on You Tube this and next month cried her heart out when she read the book. She realized, even though she is slightly older, how much like Hope she is and how nearly she could have gone Hope's way.

Do you know a Hope who may be vanishing?

I do.

That's why I care so much about this novel.

That's why I wrote it.

best and best,

Jackie M.