At last year’s BookExpo, Nic Stone found herself in the spotlight when her editor, Crown’s Phoebe Yeh, chose her debut novel, Dear Martin, as a YA Editors’ Buzz pick. The book, which centers around a black teen who writes a journal of letters to the late Martin Luther King Jr. after a racial profiling incident lands him in jail, went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was named a William C. Morris Award finalist. It now has 100,000 copies in print.

Stone is returning to the show to promote her sophomore effort, Odd One Out (Crown, Sept.). In it she introduces three teens, one boy and two girls, who, she says, “are navigating the intersection between friendship and romance—and figuring out who it’s okay to love.” Although it’s a departure from Dear Martin in some ways, Stone notes that it also deals with identity and discovering your true self. “It approaches [them] from a very different angle,” she says.

Three angles, in fact, since the novel is structured as three novellas, each narrated by a different protagonist. “I wrote the first novella in the boy’s voice, because I wanted to get that chunk out of the way first,” says Stone. “But, as it turned out, his voice was the easiest to write, while one of the girls was the most difficult character I’d ever written. Still, I was a bit shocked when I got my notes from my editor, who wrote, ‘The boy’s voice is very strong, but the girls need work.’ ”

Stone isn’t entirely surprised that she most identified with her male character. “As a reader,” she says, “I tend to be drawn to boy characters. And I’m surrounded by men. I live with my husband and two young sons, my father is one of our neighbors, and I have a lot of guy friends. In fact, some of them have complained to me that they couldn’t find anything that they really wanted to read, so I decided I wanted to write stories they would want to read.

“A number of teenage boys have told me that Dear Martin was the first book they’ve read all the way through,” Stone continues. “To me, the idea of writing a book that starts a reader is pretty powerful, and I’m very humbled by it.”