Author Event: Sonia Feldman, "Girl's Girl"
A "lustrous debut"* and a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer
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.
ABOUT SONIA FELDMAN:
Sonia Feldman lives in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Wash U. She won the PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She also runs Sonia's Poem of the Week, a popular email newsletter. Girl's Girl is her first novel.
REVIEW QUOTES:
"[A] lustrous debut . . . Feldman brings an Austenian attentiveness to the foibles of suburban adolescence. . . . This is not a story about the great rupture of coming out, but a more nuanced look at how young lovers must invent their own kinds of courtship, in ways both universal and specifically queer." --The New York Times Book Review
"Blurring the lines between friendship and romance, real life and its digital representations (selfies, the Sims), this intimate portrait of contemporary American girlhood traces the shifting relationships between three 15-year-olds over one sweltering Ohio summer." --The New York Times
"Feldman bottles the anxieties and newness of teenage years in Girl's Girl. Set in one blistering Midwestern small town summer, everything changes in Mina's friend group when her best friend unexpectedly kisses her at a sleepover. This is a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age story." --
"Girl's Girl interrogates the minutiae of girlhood and adolescence with startling reverence, whether that means analyzing the motives behind social-media behavior or portraying young people coming to terms with who they truly are." --Harper's Bazaar
Copies of Girl's Girl will be available for purchase and signing at the event. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, place your order by OCT 26 and leave a note in the Notes field requesting a signed copy and information about to whom you would like it signed.