Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman
Some books open by setting a stage. Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman opens by setting a weather. The first pages press in close to a screened-in porch in suburban Ohio, three fifteen-year-old girls draped across a wicker couch in the slow, half-aware way teenagers occupy rooms they have known since childhood. From there the rest of the novel unspools quietly, sometimes deliberately so. It is, by design, a book that prefers texture to plot, and patience to event. What the book is about, without giving anything away The premise fits on a sticky note. Mina, Margaret, and Eleanor are best friends in a leafy neighborhood called Doan. They are old enough to walk to each other’s houses, young enough that their mothers still measure their days. They play The Sims for hours. And they borrow each other’s clothes and never give them back. They photograph themselves into existence, post the proof, scrutinize the response. Then one of them kisses another, and nothing about their geometry survives intact. The novel is narrated by an adult Mina …
