Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem is a young adult contemporary novel by Autumn Cornwell. First published in 2007, this critically acclaimed book is about a teenage girl who discovers that nothing in life goes as planned, and that she can’t control everything, when her relatives make her leave her overachieving lifestyle behind to backpack around Southeast Asia with them. The book was nominated for the 2009 Rhode Island Teen Book Award, and the 2010 Truman Readers Award. Cornwell is a bestselling young adult writer who travels around the world looking for stories.

Carpe Diem is her debut novel. Before writing, she worked with refugees and actively campaigned for religious freedom.

The protagonist is Vassar Spore. She’s 16 and she lives in Seattle. Although she’s only a sophomore at the Seattle Academy of Academic Excellence, she already knows she wants to be valedictorian. If she doesn’t graduate at the top of her class, she believes she’ll a failure and she’ll never get over it. In Vassar’s world, there’s no such thing as a social life or a boyfriend. She believes that friends and romantic partners will only distract her from her goals.



Vassar’s parents encourage her overachieving ways. They named her after an elite all-female college so that she doesn’t forget her goals. Vassar’s parents are at the top of their respective fields, and she doesn’t ever want to disappoint them. When the book begins, she plans on taking AP (Advanced Placement) and AAP (Advanced Advanced Placement) classes over summer vacation, but for the first time in Vassar’s life, nothing goes according to plan.

Vassar’s grandmother, Gerd, contacts Vassar before summer vacation starts. She doesn’t want Vassar to spend the whole break stuck inside a classroom. She believes that it’s time for her granddaughter to live a little. Despite Vassar’s protests, her parents reluctantly agree to send her backpacking across Southeast Asia with her grandmother.

Gerd is a free spirit who lives a relaxed, bohemian lifestyle. Her motto is LIM, or “Live in the Moment”. She can’t understand why Vassar wants to waste her youth studying for insignificant exams. According to Gerd, grades don’t matter. Life experience is what counts. What Vassar doesn’t know is that Gerd has a secret of her own, which is why her parents let her go backpacking in the first place.



Vassar plans on finding out what the secret is, but first, she must help Gerd with an important art project. As an artist, Gerd is working on a major commission in Asia, but it’s not clear who she’s working for. All that matters to Gerd is that Vassar helps her find specific artifacts located across Malaysia.

This is a great opportunity for Vassar to test her smarts and learn new things, and for the first time, she’s excited about the trip. She packs her laptop and multiple suitcases packed with unnecessary supplies for every eventuality she can think of. While on the trip, she plans on writing a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, and her parents encourage her ambitions.

Everything goes wrong for Vassar the moment she arrives at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Gerd told Vassar she’d pick her up from the airport, but she’s nowhere to be found. Despite numerous attempts, she can’t contact Gerd, either. Vassar panics because she assumes that something happened to Gerd, and now she’s alone in Singapore without direction or help.



Vassar meets a Malaysian boy called Hanks. He’s a charming cowboy and he’s also very handsome. Vassar knows she shouldn’t trust him, because it’s dangerous to trust strangers, but he seems so sweet and gentle that she accepts his help. He teaches Vassar everything she needs to know about traveling through Malaysia, from how to use the toilets to avoiding hostage takers. Without Hank, she’d be lost, and for the first time, she feels like book-smarts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Despite Hanks’s help, Vassar gets into all kinds of trouble in Asia. She accidentally stumbles into an Opium village and she even gets stuck in a toilet. She’s questioned by the Cambodian police when she traverses the jungle landscape, and she visits a traditional hill tribe in the outskirts of Communist Laos. Hank acts as her bodyguard throughout the whole adventure, but since they fancy each other, their relationship quickly takes a romantic turn.

Vassar doesn’t know how to process her romantic feelings because she never allowed herself to indulge such emotions in the past. When she shares her first kiss with Hank, it feels like the world changes, and for the first time, she forgets about Gerd. This is exactly what Gerd planned for all along, because it turns out that she isn’t missing at all.



Vassar finds Gerd again. Gerd admits that she deliberately left Vassar to her own devices. She wanted Vassar to learn how to live freely and embrace the moment, because you can’t plan for every eventuality in the Asian wilderness. Vassar learns the value of spontaneity and she plans on enjoying life a little more when she gets home. From now on, she will seize the day.