Publisher's Synopsis
At eleven years old, Isabella Bloomberg is a pudgy, outgoing, proud science nerd, with bifocals and a serious overbite, who adores her younger sister, Callie. She has just won first place in the county science fair and has her sights set on winning something bigger - the national spelling bee, that is until she overhears a conversation that rocks her confidence and turns the once self-assured, social butterfly into a lonely recluse as she discovers a world where beauty often trumps brains.Callie blossoms into a beautiful young woman, while Isabella ─ affectionately called Bella ─ retreats into the shadows, spending countless hours tinkering with an early detection warning sensor in her makeshift basement laboratory. However, when Bella goes off to college and meets her science lab partner, handsome Hamilton Caine, she is forced to come out of the shadows. Bella's grandfather, who suffers from dementia, is persuaded that Bella's flawed early detection sensor holds the key to predicting the next mudslide, preventing a catastrophic loss of lives, like the Plainview mudslide of '79. Will her insecurities, triggered by the past, interfere with Bella finding a way to save the town of Plainview before the next mudslide? Facing her painful past, Bella embarks upon a journey of self-discovery that leads to something she never expected to find ─ LOVE.
