Pudgy, pierced, eye-lined Miles and her beautiful, slender cousin Laura were inseparable, raised as sisters in an idyllic mansion in a posh neighborhood of Georgetown. Despite her angelic appearance, Laura’s depression takes hold and she unexpectedly offs herself with a handful of pills the summer before her senior year. As a result, Miles’s physical and emotional existence veers deep into drug use, self-destructive behavior and depression. Cohn’s slick, upbeat, urban prose intensifies the sharply drawn characters that frame Miles’s world: her smooth-talking African-American best friend and crush Jamal, Miles’s goofy, rehabbed sandwich-master dad and the elusive presence of Laura, which haunts the novel’s pages like a ghost. Miles’s own voice is defiantly admirable, full of dark, black venom and determined convictions. She isn’t all doom and gloom, though, and her vulnerabilities subtly seep through with Cohn’s signature beat: disco, cigarettes, M&Ms and books. The author nails the setting too: Racial lines, socio-economics, politics, war and the sticky, sweltering heat of a summer in D.C. all fuel her descent. What results isn’t just a story about overcoming sorrow, but rather one of a girl raging against the world and herself, waiting for someone to help her make sense of it all. (Fiction. YA)
