When 18 year-old Maya leaves Chicago for a six week Australian home stay, she assumes she’s heading to beautiful Barangaroo with its famous Sydney Harbour views—NOT Barangaroo Creek, a stinking hot, fly-ridden, wi-fi dead zone hours from a decent body of water. Add her host brother, Gus, who wishes she landed in someone else’s sheep paddock, and Maya is convinced she’s in for six weeks of Hicksville hell.

Gus has an important trip planned this summer— a trip that does NOT include helping an animal-phobic girl from the States tick off items on her seriously clichéd Aussie must-do list. So he comes up with a list of his own—one guaranteed to send Maya back across the Pacific, leaving him free to enjoy the last of his freedom before he heads off to agricultural college like every generation of his family has.

But when Maya doesn’t scare that easily, sparks begin to fly. Soon Gus and Maya discover there are hidden depths to clichéd bucket-lists and secret summer trips, and that sometimes it takes someone half a world away to remind you of all the reasons you’re here.

Isabel Tunstall