BEFORE WE WERE BLUE

The lives of two 17-year-old girls, burdened by secrets, collide in an eating disorder clinic.

Shoshana, the good girl, is a champion cheerleader from a seemingly stable and wealthy suburban home. Rowan, the wild child, is fleeing her struggling single mother’s emotional manipulation and neglect and fighting to forget a violation she doesn’t yet understand. Both girls are carrying wounds that they keep from each other, the adults around them, and even themselves. As they struggle with their own past experiences of trauma, self-harm, and family pressures, they fall into an intense and obsessive friendship as a way to manage and control both their own demons and each other. Will they find it in themselves to heal and move forward? Do they even want to? The book gracefully wrestles with these questions as the story unfurls in alternating chapters that move between Shoshana’s and Rowan’s points of view. This call-and-response structure allows for a gradual reveal of each girl’s past and present in a way that both builds suspense and feels like the growth of intimacy in friendship and love as well as the therapeutic encounter they are experiencing in the clinic. Both girls, as well as most supporting characters, default to White. The book balances tensions of class, antisemitism, and sexuality in complex and compassionate ways.

A gut-wrenching and cathartic page-turner about identity, desire, and the strength it takes to heal.