How Steve Weinstein Sends an Ambitious College Student on a Fast Track to Fame in Nuts To You
She started with a notepad and a cell phone. Within weeks, she had business cards, a legal team, and a plan for the movie version.
That is the career arc of Leanne, the organized half of the friendship duo in Steve Weinstein’s comic novel Nuts To You, a story that is as much about ambition as it is about squirrels. Leanne arrives in Queens as a college student on a surprise visit. She leaves as a documentarian, negotiator, and future author, with a growing suspicion that the best material in the world is hiding in a stranger’s backyard. Weinstein lets her rise the way most real careers do, by asking for a better title.
A Title Worth Printing
After a chaotic afternoon in the Ballnick garden, Dr. Radcliffe hands Leanne the job of scientific assistant. She takes the news gracefully for about a paragraph. Then she rebrands herself as a “scientific documentary historian,” which sounds nicer and looks better on the business cards she has already ordered. Her phone, the narrator informs us, is now her official documentary camera, and every squirrel, plate of crackers, and heated argument is potential footage. It is a small joke about how much of ambition is just vocabulary.
The new title changes how she looks at everyone, including her professor. He has stopped being a teacher, she decides, and become more of a peer. With a flash of her best smile and a locked, seven-second stare, she asks, “So professor, aside from everything else that just happened, are you happy to see us?” The narrator compares her timing to asking Lincoln’s wife how she enjoyed the play. Her confidence is impressive. Her sense of the moment is another matter.
The Waiver
Weinstein’s best comic weapon in this section is paperwork. As Radcliffe hurries to a taxi, he hands Leanne a legal-size envelope with a waiver inside. It is nothing special, he says, just a run-of-the-mill form that his legal team and publisher recommended, a bit of “legal mumbo jumbo” to protect privacy and avoid copyright disputes. Mia, delighted, assumes it is a permission slip to miss school. “How thoughtful,” she says.
The real meaning is that Radcliffe intends to keep the story for himself. Richard translates it in plain language, that the doctor does not want her going public or selling to the newspapers without permission, and Pincus, the lawyer, answers with the oldest delay tactic in the profession. “Give us a chance to look it over and we’ll get back to you.” Leanne, who begins the scene confused, begins to realize that a legal document can be a two-way street.
• Who owns a story, the person who lived it or the one who wrote it down?
• When was the last time a form told you more than the person handing it over?
Fighting for Her Name
The battle comes to a head when the doctor makes the mistake of calling her his helper. Leanne frowns. He tries to compromise with “junior secretary,” and her frown turns to scorn. So she recites a verbal résumé that would impress a hiring committee: she made sure the experiment went well, checked every detail, put every squirrel in place at the proper time, and even watched the peanut-butter-and-serum crackers get eaten, complete with a gagging mime. Without her quotes, pictures, and videos, she adds, his precious paper would look like a Disney cartoon.
Then she gets serious. She asks Richard for advice, and he quietly hands her the names of a few law professors, adding, “Please, this is just between us.” A few meetings later, her pictures, notes, emails, and videos are copyrighted, and everyone in the story has signed a waiver. If she could have gotten Smiley and Zina to sign, the narrator says, she would have. Her title climbs from junior secretary to secretary, senior secretary, scientific aide, and finally co-author, with a fair portion of the royalties. It is Weinstein at his most playful, a small legal thriller staged entirely inside one college student’s phone.
The Squirrel Chronicles
There is one small problem. Leanne has not actually started writing. She has a title she likes, The Squirrel Chronicles, a friend who thinks it sounds too much like science fiction, and a collaborator who likes it because it hints at future papers that, if planned correctly, could last forever. When the girls return to campus, they find bedsheet banners and students waving from the dorms. It turns out Mia has been telling people, and when Leanne demands to know who, Mia admits she told the school newspaper editor, who once winked at her. “Do pictures count?” she asks.
Then comes the radio interview, where the host wears a perfect CIA frown and wonders whether the squirrels can carry nuclear bombs the size of walnuts in their mouths. Vendors sell T-shirts asking “Tired of Being a Squirrel?” and Leanne builds herself an Excel spreadsheet to manage the future. Nuts To You was released on October 31, 2026, and readers can follow Leanne as she chases fame, juggles her schedule, and finds out that a good story is easier to live than to write. Like Leanne, readers will soon learn that this story saves its biggest surprise for last, with an ending no one sees coming.
A title can be a career in itself…
A waiver can be a weapon…
A note pad can be a first draft of history…
In Nuts To You, the girl with the phone has the biggest plan in Queens.
Author Name: Steve Weinstein
Book Title: Nuts To You
Published By: Author Path Publishers
