Andy Behrens

Andy Behrens brings comic energy and close attention to adolescent social anxiety into stories about teenagers. Dutton released Beauty and the Bully in 2008, following Duncan, whose reputation as a bully hides a more complicated private life, and Carly, a classmate drawn into an unexpected connection with him. Behrens uses their changing relationship to question how quickly school communities turn labels into fixed identities. The book combines a coming-of-age story with romance while keeping embarrassment, miscommunication, and peer judgment in view. Behrens also wrote All the Way, Sex Drive, and The Fast and the Furriest, works that similarly place awkward young protagonists in fast-moving situations. Kirkus and publisher records identify his fiction with humor as well as emotional stakes. Beauty and the Bully shows that balance clearly: its title invokes a familiar school type, but the story is interested in what happens when two teenagers look beyond the roles their classmates have assigned them.