Serious Girls by Maxine Swann

This book captures just perfectly what it's like to be a teenage girl and a bit of an outcast (although doesn't everyone feel outcast as a teen?). Two sixteen-year-old girls meet at an East Coast boarding school and strike up a friendship. They wonder what life will bring them and decide to jump into life instead of waiting for it to find them.

Unfortunately, the book as a whole didn't live up to its initial promise for me. The author put her main characters into some situations that I felt didn't quite mesh with my sense of the girls. Or maybe it's not what I wanted to happen to them, to be honest. One meets a 32 year old man in New York and has an affair. The other gets into an abusive relationship with a local drop-out. When the narrator starts drifting and becoming discontent in her relationship with the older man she recedes in some ways that made me hate her and find her whiny.

Swann is an amazing writer, and I hear that her new novel, Flower Children, is amazing. But her debut disappointed me. I think I wanted it to be a different book. I wanted something more about the interior lives of these girls, more about their friendship. I just wanted more of something different than what I found. Maybe that's a fault I shouldn't place in the book. I just wish I knew someone else who's read this so I could hash it all out.