Publisher's Weekly Review
Crane's ingenious debut follows the members of a sorority house at an unnamed Massachusetts college in the years before and after the death of sorority member Margot. Each chapter functions as a standalone story that ties back to the house. Some characters, like Margot's roommate and lover Deirdre, have narratives that revolve largely around Margot's life and death. For other characters, she's a background figure as they navigate their fraught senior years of high school or their difficult post-college years. Anorexic Shannon and straight-edge Lucy grow up best friends, but pretend not to know one another as they get ready to rush. Wry, outspoken Twyla, whose dying mother wants to be euthanized, checks into a hospital after cutting herself. Hoping to end her pregnancy, Kyra goes to the first clinic she finds online and is dissuaded by its antiabortion staff. Crane's prose is thoughtful and haunting; she expertly brings characters to life, especially in Jennifer's chapter, in which a plain high school senior sees herself in her Crucible character Mary Warren: "I was rehearsing for many years of trying to be seen by the women I hated and adored," she says. The multivoice structure fits the story perfectly, resulting in a stellar examination of female relationships. Agent: Robert E. Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Traditions abide in this sorority house, especially when it comes to members who are as unhinged and harsh as the group's 1863 founders.This book has everything you might expect in a novel about a sorority: eating disorders everyone is aware of but ignores; unplanned pregnancy; sexual assault perpetrated by brutish frat boys; trichotillomania; age-old Greek traditions such as swallowing fireplace ashes and assigning mean-spirited nicknames in the interest of fun; and ample drug and alcohol abuse. The last, coupled with a heart defect, leads to the focal event of the story: the death of Margot, who lived in Room Epsilon. Each section of the book is told from the perspective of a different sister, one of the founders, orin keeping with the Greek mythology conceitthe chorus who sees all. Margot's overdoseor was it suicide?reverberates throughout the story as the sisters carry on with their own lives, handling their own personal triumphs, tumults, and tragedies. But one sister in particular, Deirdre, may never recover. Her relationship with Margot went beyond the frenemy status of sisterhood: They fell in love. Crane, once a sorority sister herself, skillfully reproduces sorority life: the particular cruel caring of these friendships, the intensity of this way station before the adult world, the way the decisions made during that time can stay with a young woman. Crane shows that the college experience is not all frivolity and fecklessness but the foundation of autonomous personhood, that plunging in is risky and unknowable. As Margot once said, "Pledging is like sprinting in the dark without a flashlight."The strain and pain of sorority sisterhood are not redeemed by lifelong kinship in this unflinching depiction of hardhearted girls growing up. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
On an unnamed New England campus, an unnamed sorority reels from the death of one of its sisters. Margot's demise is only a minor taste of the many horrors suffered by the sisters everything from eating disorders to OCD to desperation for parental approval, each darkly rendered in a distinct voice. Interspersed is the chorus, which tries to make sense of the rumors surrounding each girl, Margot's death, and the resultant fallout. The novel reads like a collection of interconnected short stories, with female characters who may look familiar (sorority girls, obviously), but a true understanding of their natures lies just out of reach, even as backstories and tales of postcollege life are unfolded. (The one false note is the treatment of the only overweight sister, who is pathetic and lonely and literally busts the seams of a bridesmaid dress.) Too literary to be the dishy fun one might expect from a novel about a sorority, Crane's debut will appeal to readers who relish an unreliable narrator and those for whom traditional tales of sisterhood read as facile.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2018 Booklist
