... thoughtful ... While readers may wish that some aspects of the earlier timeline were more fully tied up or further explored, those characters who return vividly demonstrate the lingering effects of their teenage traumas and the stories they'd told themselves to address them. Gallagher's debut establishes her as one to watch.
Gallagher’s first novel follows several young teenagers who find trouble in disparate parts of America in the mid-1990s...Fourteen-year-old Judy, unmoored by the unwanted attentions of her new stepfather, impulsively decides to go to a party several hours away from her home in Los Angeles with her friend Meghan, who has connected with a slightly older girl named Cassie on the internet. But upon arriving at the address provided by Cassie, the girls find an unsettling older woman who imprisons them in Cassie’s room. The real Cassie is just 12, and has traveled to Nevada to visit her aloof mother following a horrific assault she’s kept secret...Some of these characters narrowly avoid tragedy, while others do not fare as well...An ambitious, if at times uneven, debut.
When 14-year-olds Meghan and Judy sneak away to find Cassie—supposedly a model—whom they’ve grown to adore in a chat room, their disappointing mothers barely notice their daughters’ absences...There are a few too many characters for comfort: Meghan, Cassie, Miles, and Tez all get outsized attention given their secondary roles in the arc of the novel...Until Part 3, it is unclear who will matter, and it can be disappointing when beloved figures are forgotten...Still, the prose is good, the plot progresses at a satisfying clip, and the characters are endearingly flawed (except for Judy/Jude, whose only moral flaw is having a bad mother, lover, and friend)...Gallagher writes meaningfully about the intergenerational impacts of addiction, abuse, and sexual violence...An earnest novel about the insecurities of adolescence and the impossibility of escaping one's past.
Gallagher harnesses the turbulence and cadence of adolescence in this ambitious if uneven debut...Two of the novel’s three sections are set in the 1990s, starting with the account of best friends Meghan and Judy, both 14, as they slip away for the weekend to attend a house party thrown by a girl Meghan met online...Gallagher is at her best when conveying the vulnerable, yearning space between childhood and maturity, such as when Miles scurries through the dark with his companions in a former department store marked for demolition and suddenly becomes scared...Gallagher falters in the third section, speeding toward a conclusion where the disparate characters collide in 2016 Brooklyn...Despite some missteps, Gallagher perfectly captures a generation’s dislocated vibe.
