Five books that explore female friendship & adolescence

Maggie Nye is the author of The Curators. She is a writer and teacher whose work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans Writer in Residence program.

The short story from which The Curators grew was published in Pleiades.

At Lit Hub Nye tagged five books

that center on women, too, on bodies that share the intimacy of aging, of heat and change, of infirmity. What is common to all of them is a propulsive and generous knowing and loving so strong and terrible that it transcends the individual and absorbs the girls and women in its orbit into shared rapture.

One title on the list:

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

In this mystery novel, a team of aimless cheerleaders in small-town America finds focus and drive under the leadership of young new coach, Colette French. Her arrival, however, disrupts the existing power structures within the team, which are as elaborate and precarious as the human pyramids the squad drills at practice.

If you’re thinking to yourself cheerleaders? I’m simply too spooky for cheerleaders, then reader, I once thought as you do now, but trust me, you’re dead wrong. Abbott writes a world where twinning synchronicity, body purging, blood-pacting teenhood is not so much a spectacle but an underpinning of life.

Like [Mónica Ojeda's] Jawbone, this is a novel obsessed with the changing bodies of its central characters, and the limits of those bodies. The book probes the uncomfortably porous boundaries of desire between childhood and adulthood; plus, there’s a juicy murder!

Read about another book on the list.

Dare Me is among Amelia Kahaney's six books featuring characters growing up against the wall, Frederick Weisel's six crime novels set in public school classrooms, Rachel Kapelke-Dale's eleven unexpected thrillers about female rage, Debbie Babitt's eight top coming-of-age thrillers, Avery Bishop's top five novels that explore "mean girl" culture, Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue