From a dazzling new talent, a sensual and spellbinding;novel;about one summer that shatters the balance between three best friends, forcing them to confront the line between friendship and desire Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of this pivotal summer, where the girls have nowhere new to go and everything new to feel. Looking back, an adult Mina traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. The rituals of girlhood--gossip, selfies, sleepovers, and videogames--become threads in a delicate, volatile web of intimacy, in which everything feels achingly fleeting and permanently etched. Loving one person, Mina learns, can change the way we love everyone else--including ourselves.; Bold, vulnerable, and sharply observant, <Girl’s Girl <is a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer.

Autorentext

Sonia Feldman

Klappentext

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “lustrous debut” and a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer

“Feldman brings an Austenian attentiveness to the foibles of suburban adolescence. . . . The pleasure of Girl’s Girl is that it reveals the invisible jealousies, affections and gnawing needs lurking at the edge of so many seemingly trivial images of young womanhood.”—Sanjena Sathian, The New York Times Book Review***

Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of this pivotal summer, where the girls have nowhere new to go and everything new to feel.

Looking back, an adult Mina traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. The rituals of girlhood—gossip, selfies, sleepovers, and videogames—become threads in a delicate, volatile web of intimacy, in which everything feels achingly fleeting and permanently etched. Loving one person, Mina learns, can change the way we love everyone else—including ourselves.

Leseprobe
Growing up, I had two best friends—­Margaret, whom I had known my whole life, and Eleanor, with whom I was in love, though for years I had no reason to tell my feelings for one apart from my feelings for the other. Both were fervent.

Eleanor asked me for advice about her Sims, then never took it. Margaret asked me in which of a series of nearly identical photos I thought her boobs looked best for the internet, so I told her. I kept the clothes Eleanor lent me for too long, and I kept the clothes Margaret lent me for too long. Eleanor didn’t borrow anybody’s clothes, and Margaret never gave mine back at all.

We chose each other’s outfits. We slept in each other’s beds. I had a near constant awareness of both my friends as existing in parallel to myself. And that awareness became tender when we were apart, painful when I was apart from them and they were not apart from each other. This happened often enough. They both had a great deal more freedom than I did. Margaret because she was lawless and Eleanor because her parents never made any laws.

Until the summer before our sophomore year of high school, I thought my love for Eleanor was my love for Margaret. Distinctions between ways of loving are fuzzy, and I couldn’t name them, didn’t even know I felt them, and least of all suspected I would soon ruin my life learning to distinguish them—­learning I wanted more than one way to love my friends.

On an early, empty afternoon in June, I told my mom I needed to walk over to Margaret’s house. I didn’t explain my urgency because if I said I had to hear Margaret’s gossip in person, she’d ask me what the gossip was about.

At fifteen, I was allowed to walk most places. Doan, our neighborhood in the upper right-­hand corner of Ohio, was residential, majority populated by white people, the neighbors all apparently heterosexual. Massive hundred-­year-­old trees lined its streets, announcing stable affluence. A number of main boulevards stroked through the neighborhood in straight, cardinal directions. Between them ran a network of snaking circuitous avenues that met in irregular, asterisk-­like intersections. Cars often lingered too long at stop signs, uncertain who held the right of way. None of these things prevented my mother from being afraid for me all the time, though I was aware that was their purpose. I didn’t know how to accommodate her fear, and I didn’t know how to assess its validity. Very few bad things had ever happened to me. She saw precarity where other people’s parents seemed to see regular life. But then, she was smarter than everyone else. There was no one I trusted more than I trusted her.

The walk to Margaret’s took between five and ten minutes depending on my mood. My mood depended on the weather. The weather that day was humid, my pace languorous. Dense air blurred my skin with sweat by the time I arrived at her house, a friendly rectangular building with a large front yard and a screened-­in porch out back. The porch was old and heavily used, with mesh panels for walls that bowed outward like the knees of well-­loved pants. I walked directly up the driveway to the back of the house and opened the screen door.

Margaret lay face down on the large white wicker couch in the middle of the room with her shirt off and her chestnut hair pushed up above her head, so it fell over the edge of the armrest. Eleanor straddled her back, her legs folded on either side of Margaret’s bare torso. Bent over, her face hovered inches above Margaret’s skin, a tissue fixed between her fingers. I raised my phone to take a picture of them. Margaret held up a thumb. Eleanor righted herself at the sight of me.

“Totally standard,” I said with pleased sarcasm.

“As usual,” Margaret sang.

Eleanor extracted a pimple from Margaret’s right shoulder blade using her gel-­polished fingernails and dismounted. Margaret pulled her shirt back on. I sat down in an adjacent chair. The porch looked like every other space in Margaret’s house, crowded with belongings and evidence of feminine inhabitation. Spare cushions sat in tipping piles pushed up against the room’s mesh perimeter. Potted plants on stands dripped green vines onto the tiled floor, and baskets of decade-­old magazines featured the faces of girls we knew only as the women they’d become and instructions about sex we recognized as outdated but couldn’t help occasionally reading aloud to each other in the guise of a joke.

“Mar refused to tell me anything until you got here, no previews, even though you’ve already heard,” Eleanor complained.

She removed herself to the far side of the couch and sat down with her legs folded beneath her, her elbow on the armrest and her pointed chin in her hand.

“Mar needs her whole audience—­” I said.

“—­and phone tellings only half-­count,” Margaret finished, her skin dewy with sweat and the pleasure of having gathered us for a purpose.

Margaret had recently given head for the first time. Hence my need to come over right away, lest she tell Eleanor in person without me. Neither of us had ever made it past anybody&rs…