FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Cameron was fifteen, Sonia was her best friend--no one could come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.

When an unexpected letter arrives from Sonia ten years after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron doesn't reply, despite Oliver's urging. But then he passes away, and Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her. Now without a job, a home, and a purpose, Cameron decides to honor his request, setting off on the road to find this stranger who was once her inseparable other half.

The Myth of You and Me, the story of Cameron and Sonia's friendship--as intense as any love affair--and its dramatic demise, captures the universal sense of loss and nostalgia that often lingers after the end of an important relationship. Searingly honest, beautiful, and full of fragile urgency, The Myth of You and Me is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Stewart peers into the complicated heart of friendship in a moving second novel (after 2000's Body of a Girl). Ever since a cataclysmic falling out with her best friend, Sonia, after college, Cameron's closest companion has been Oliver, the 92-year-old historian she lives with and cares for in Oxford, Miss. Oliver's death leaves Cameron alone and adrift, until she discovers that he has given her one last task: she must track down her estranged best friend (whose letter announcing her engagement Cameron had so recently ignored) and deliver a mysterious present to her. Cameron's journey leads her back to the people, places and memories of their shared past, when they called themselves "Cameronia" and swore to be friends forever. It was a relationship more powerful than romantic love--yet romantic love (or sex, anyway) could still wreck it. Stewart lures the reader forward with two unanswered questions: What was the disaster that ended their friendship, and what will be revealed when Cameron and Sonia are together again and Oliver's package is finally opened? The book is heartfelt and its characters believable jigsaw puzzles of insecurities, talents and secrets, and if Cameron's carefully guarded anger makes her occasionally disagreeable, readers will nevertheless welcome her happy ending. Agent, Gail Hochman. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Stewart's Bildungsroman contains several incandescently beautiful passages about the challenges awaiting young women as they come of age. Cameron, the narrator, is reflecting on her youth and reminiscing about Sonia, a troubled and difficult girlhood friend. Their bond withstood several impediments, including the dysfunctional behaviors of Sonia's family, but Cameron ultimately decided to end their friendship. A decade later, in an effort to reconnect, Sonia mails a letter to Cameron, which Cameron ignores until her mentor and employer intervenes. At his behest, Cameron sets off in search of her old friend. Traveling around America, Cameron reunites with a number of individuals and finds herself questioning their immeasurable influence. In this well-developed personality study, Stewart (Body of a Girl) highlights the various Southwestern, Northeastern, and Southern geographical terrains that figure prominently in Cameron's quest. The story, filled with secrets and treasures, is a well-executed, compelling look at attraction, love, and trust. Recommended for all popular fiction collections.-Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Cameron Wilson, 14, is an overly tall army brat and a new kid in town. She begins an intense friendship with classmate Sonia Gray after the two meet while literally saving one another from disastrous situations. The friendship blows up in college, and Cameron struggles through a small, uninspired life until, at age 29, she ends up as caregiver to elderly Oliver Douchet, a famed historian. Then a letter arrives from Sonia telling of her upcoming marriage and wondering why the two of them had gone their separate ways when they had shared so much. Cameron chooses to do nothing until Oliver dies and leaves a package for her to deliver personally to Sonia. So begins Cameron's journey to find and understand her lost friend and, ultimately, herself. The novel unfolds at an unhurried, graceful pace, moving through flashbacks and memories, but the interest in what Oliver could have sent to Sonia sharpens the edge and drives the plot. Teens will appreciate the high-school beginning of this relationship and Stewart's notion that friendship can define a life. A poignant and bittersweet story of love.-Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A young woman travels from Mississippi to Massachusetts to look up her former best friend. In her second novel (Body of a Girl, 2000), Stewart introduces Cameron, the 31-year-old reclusive paid companion/secretary to aging historian Oliver Doucet in Oxford, Miss. Stewart's spare, elegant prose conveys the rhythm of their life together, capturing the bittersweet complexity of their mutual platonic devotion, both selfless and selfish. After receiving a letter from her ex-friend Sonia announcing her engagement, Cameron ignores Oliver's advice to respond to Sonia's overture of reconciliation. When Oliver, who believes that "all times exist simultaneously," dies a few months later, he leaves a posthumous request that Cameron take a mysterious wrapped wedding gift to Sonia, with whom he has evidently carried on his own correspondence and wants Cameron to see again. Since early adolescence, Cameron and Sonia had been soul mates, their friendship as intense as a love affair and as bitter and complex in its dissolution. Sonia was the local girl who befriended Cameron when she moved to New Mexico at 14. In return, Cameron supported Sonia in her struggle to maintain her self-esteem despite a hypercritical-to-the-point-of-crazy mother. Steward beautifully delineates this complex relationship, but then the plot begins to strain. Cameron never revealed her secret crush on Sonia's boyfriend Will, so all these years later she has not forgiven Sonia for sleeping with Cameron's college boyfriend the night Sonia's father died, even though Sonia was acting out of grief and was immediately sorry. Cameron's moral outrage feels contrived, as does her passionate reunion with Will. By the time Cameron readsOliver's letter explaining his own secrets and regrets, Cameron has become a less-than-sympathetic heroine. A terrific opening slides into heavy-handed philosophizing and sentimental romance.