Paper Aeroplanes Books in Order

The Paper Aeroplanes books follow two fifteen-year-old girls, Renée and Flo, growing up on Guernsey in the mid-1990s. At school they have circled each other for years: Renée loud and restless, Flo quiet and watchful. Both come from difficult homes and both feel like outsiders, but in different ways. The series steps right into that moment when being a teenager feels claustrophobic and limitless at the same time.

Flo lives with her exhausted mum and baby sister, carrying more responsibility than most of her classmates. She is studious, anxious and constantly trying not to rock the boat, clinging to a toxic friendship group because it seems safer than being alone. Renée, by contrast, lives with strict grandparents after losing her mum, and wears her pain as toughness, leaning into parties, boys and trouble before anyone can hurt her first.

When a family tragedy cracks Flo's careful world, it is Renée who knows how grief feels and steps toward her. What begins as an awkward connection becomes an intense friendship built on late-night phone calls, shared beds, secret crushes and the kind of honesty they have never risked with anyone else. Around them, the island's gossip, exams and low-level chaos keep pushing them together and pulling them apart.

The first book, Paper Aeroplanes, follows one school year as the girls navigate sex, bullying, loss and the thrill of finally finding your person in a place that can feel very small.

Goose picks up about eighteen months later, in their final year of school. Renée is living with her aunt Jo and dreaming of escape, wondering whether she will ever find someone who loves her without conditions. Flo is drawn into a church youth group and finds unexpected comfort in faith, just as she had assumed she and Renée would head to university together and stay side by side. Their plans, and the versions of themselves they thought they had to be, start to splinter.

Across the two novels O'Porter keeps the tone sharp, funny and emotionally blunt. There are frank discussions of sex and bodies, messy friendships, parents who disappoint and teachers who miss the point, all written from inside the girls' heads rather than from a safe adult distance. For many readers it feels like opening a time capsule from the 1990s: mix tapes, paper notes, long bus rides and no mobile phones in sight, just two girls working out who they are and whether they can grow without growing apart.