After her dad’s affair with a younger woman, Alex moves with her mom to her dead grandmother’s house in small-town Connecticut. There she meets the Bishop twins: Fred, who is a dashingly good-looking charmer, and Adina, who is cold and flippantly standoffish. Alex is both bewildered and intrigued by them. Fred’s advances seem more romantic than friendly, and Adina’s self-absorbed, distant behavior puts her off. Before she knows it, she’s enveloped in their world and trapped between her feelings for Fred and Adina’s destructive eating disorder, alcoholism and jealousy. Strasnick’s slim second offering packs a lot into its short chapters: divorce, broken friendships, crushes, the lines between love and sex and more. Characterization, scenes, dialogue and setting are seamlessly distilled into so few sharp, image-rich phrases that the novel reads almost as if it were written in verse. Less is definitely more here, and readers are plunged into Alex’s physical and emotional world within three to four words. Although the plot moves swiftly, the author’s ability to capture Alex’s inner world in so few words give the novel depth and balance. Complex and thought-provoking. (Fiction. 14 & up)
