Atty in Love

A Kirkus Best Young Adult Book of the Year, 2024

A tender and funny contemporary story about first love and animal rights.

When feisty 13 year old Atticus Peale meets a mysterious boy in her Alabama town, she has to make a tough choice between her values as an activist and her first real love.

Atticus T. Peale—Atty for short—is thirteen and a self-described advocate for animals. She’s also a vegetarian atheist in the heart of the Deep South’s bible belt, where ribs and guns and church are a way of life, and euthanizing animals is just the way they’ve always dealt with strays.

Having already been to court to save her dog Easy, Atty spends a lot of her free time designing plans for a no-kill-shelter in her small Alabama town while juggling school work, hanging out with her best friend Reagan, and battling “the blues.”

But when Atty meets a mysterious boy at the county fair, her world begins to crumble. As it becomes increasingly clear that this boy—with his wild hair and rough hands--works with a captive animal, Atty must choose between her own values and the boy she's fallen for.

Atty in Love is about the tough choices that arise when two principled people disagree. It is also a story about what it means to, as Atty likes to say, “contain multitudes”—to love both men and women, to defend your mixed-race family in the American South, to care for someone who experiences the world in fundamentally different ways than you do. Tender and laugh-out-loud funny, the book includes an interview with the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic’s real-life animal law expert Katherine Meyer.

Tim Lockette is a teacher, writer, and former journalist who lives in Jacksonville, Alabama. His middle-grade debut novel, Atty at Law, was praised in a starred review from Kirkus. His next two novels, Tell It True and Atty in Love, were written for young adult readers. Tell It True was a Junior Literary Guild Selection and won the Whippoorwill Book Award, which honors books that dispel stereotypes about young people in rural areas and small towns.