Melody Carlson

Melody Carlson’s new novel Trapped (NavPress) delves into the life of a grade-A student whose life spins out of control. When her grades start to suffer, she sees only one option—cheating. Melody says, “When I heard statistics reporting that 80 percent of the country’s best students have participated in academic cheating, I got curious. And naturally I wanted to write a story about it. I wanted answers to these questions: what happens when a student knows peers are cheating; what happens when a student gives in to cheating; and what happens when a student gets caught? To me those were the ingredients of a good teen novel. That’s how Trapped was conceived.”