In her blockbuster debut novel, Ordinary People, Judith Guest established herself as a perceptive chronicler of adolescent problems and emotions. Both Ordinary People and her follow-up novel, Second Heaven, focus on likeable, sensitive teenage boys who face personal and family crises. "[Adolescence is] a period of time ... where people are very vulnerable and often don't have much experience to draw on as far as human relationships go," she told Barbara Holliday of the Detroit Free Press. "At the same time they are making some pretty heavy decisions ... about how they're going to relate to people and how they're going to shape their lives." In an interview with Contemporary Authors New Revisions (CANR) Guest said that she can relate to young adult characters because she still sees vestiges of adolescence in herself: "I'm sure there are things in my own adolescence that I have not completed yet, things that...