Follow Your Arrow

Overview

CeCe Ross has spent her teenage years building an identity in public. Alongside her girlfriend Silvie, she's half of an influencer couple whose outfits, inside jokes, and affection play out for an audience of devoted followers. When Silvie ends the relationship, CeCe loses more than a girlfriend — she loses the role she's performed for years, and she's left wondering whether her audience will stay now that the storyline they followed has ended.

Into this vacuum comes Josh, a boy who isn't online in any meaningful way and has no idea who CeCe is to anyone outside her own neighborhood. CeCe has always known she's bisexual, so her attraction to him isn't the surprise; what unsettles her is the chance to be someone Josh likes without the internet already having an opinion about it. She starts keeping her online life separate from her life with him, and the gap between the two grows harder to manage.

The novel follows CeCe toward the moment that gap closes on its own, forcing her to answer for the version of herself she's shown Josh against the version everyone else has watched for years. Verdi uses CeCe's split life to ask what's left of a person's private self once so much of it has already been made public.

Identity On and Off the Record

Follow Your Arrow takes its place among a wave of contemporary YA novels examining how growing up now means growing up partly in public. CeCe's dilemma isn't simply romantic; it's about authorship — who gets to define her, and whether the self she curates for an audience can coexist with the self she's still figuring out offline. Her bisexuality is treated as settled fact rather than a question to be resolved, which shifts the story's tension elsewhere: toward image management, consent around what gets shared, and the particular vulnerability of a breakup that happens with an audience watching.

The book also sits comfortably alongside the YA romance and coming-of-age tradition it nods to, trading some of that genre's familiar beats — a new crush, a breakup, a secret that can't hold — for a specifically internet-age setting. Verdi uses CeCe's influencer status less as a gimmick than as a lens on a broader adolescent anxiety: the fear that who you are depends on who's watching.

Why Follow Your Arrow Has Been Challenged

CeCe's relationship with Silvie, including the public nature of their breakup and the open acknowledgment of CeCe's bisexuality, is the element that has drawn the most scrutiny. Objectors have pointed to the book's matter-of-fact treatment of a same-sex teen relationship and to CeCe's subsequent attraction to a boy as content they consider inappropriate for younger readers or unsuitable for school library shelves, arguing that LGBTQ+ relationships and identity exploration shouldn't be presented without qualification in material accessible to teens. Some challenges have also cited the novel's broader focus on teen romance and physical attraction as reasons for restricting access. In this catalog, Follow Your Arrow has been challenged or banned in 1 state and 1 district.