I do love the Rockies! This is going to be extremely sappy, but my favorite backpacking trip was just a year and a half ago. What was your most memorable trip in the Rockies? Have you had any notable wildlife encounters like Lida does in the book? You grew up in Idaho, and you obviously love the wilderness there.
So please do! And you don't have to take just my word for its quality: It has two starred reviews now, one from Booklist, which said "this psychological mind-bender is raw, gripping, and deftly rolled out by a writer-to-watch," and another from Kirkus, which called it "a smashing debut."Īnd because this is my blog, by golly, here's my chance to talk about that ending publicly! And ask Erin a few other questions along the way:ġ. At some point, I want to talk about the ending publicly with Erin, because it grew out of her own reactions as a teenage reader to YA fiction and is fascinating in light of those but I can't do that until more people have read it and might join in the discussion. This book *gets* female friendships/crushes/enemyships and their complexities, and as each of the girls has secrets that can be used as weapons, the book builds constantly in tension as we wait for those knives to come out and be used. She still has that jagged, smart, sad voice, but it's now applied to a story and a place that are rare in YA fiction, focused on the relationships among a trio of teenage girls at a wilderness boarding school in Idaho: strong Boone, glamorous Gia, and Lida, who is torn between the poles they represent. The book she produced is worth that fight, and my years-long wait for it. And she did - after finishing an MFA, publishing several short stories, and having agents fight for the right to represent her. So when I became an associate editor in 2003 and was first feeling my power (ahem), I sent her a letter suggesting that she write a YA novel. Even in college, she was in control of her ideas and the effects she wanted to achieve, and the edges of that voice cut. While I produced odd metafictions based on my personal theories about reading and writing, leavened with pre-graduation depression, she wrote infinitely better stories about believable teenage girls, always with terrifically jagged, smart, sad, sardonic voices. The usual caveat: I edited this, I'm biased, la la la.Īctually, I'm more biased than even usual here, because Erin was in the only creative writing class I ever took, our senior year at Carleton College. I'll let my Goodreads review of this book start me off here:
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