In this delightful debut novel, a daughter of a quaint New England college town returns to confront her father’s legacy and the surprising pieces of life he has left behind.  Maggie Pouncey has created an unforgettable charac­ter in the young, headstrong, and quick-witted Flora Dempsey, the only child of Lewis Dempsey, beloved former college president and a famous academic in the league of Harold Bloom. On hearing the news of her father’s death, Flora hastily quits her big-city magazine job and returns to her hometown to in­habit his house. But even weightier is her appoint­ment as her father’s literary executor; it seems he was secretly writing poems at the end of his life—love poems, to a girlfriend Flora didn’t even know he had. Suddenly besieged by well-wishers and literary blog­gers alike, Flora has no choice but to figure out how to navigate it all: the fate of the poems, her relation­ship with the girlfriend who wants a place in her life, her memories of her parents’ divorce, and her own uncertain future.  At once comic and profound, Perfect Reader is a heady, uplifting story of loneliness and of the spur to growth that grief can be. Brimming with life, and with the elbow-patchy wisdom and energy of her still-vivid father, Flora’s story will set her free to be the “perfect reader” not only of her father’s life but of her own life as well.