When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama is on the cusp of winning the White House; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging - a transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents' scandalous divorce.But he soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of Kennedy's social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled. Eighteen months later, Foster is expelled, following a tragedy that leaves Kennedy irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster's old dorm room, he begins an epic yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interivews with former classmates, Foster's blog posts, playlists, and text archives, and the narrator's own obsessive imagination, a story unfurls - one that asks us who owns our personal narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villians of our own stories. Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and, most distinctly, how we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives." -- Jacket flap