Sonia Feldman lives in Cleveland, Ohio. She won the PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She also runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, a popular email newsletter.
Girl’s Girl is her first novel.
At Lit Hub Feldman tagged six "excellent books about girl friendship, all of which invite you into a dynamic, the feeling of being among—a thrilling place to be." One title on the list:
Toni Morrison, SulaRead about another title on the list.
Sula is an epic friendship novel set in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the relationship between Nel and Sula—bound to each other in fastfriendship as children and bound still as adults, even as their choices divide their lives and a true betrayal upends them. As a reading experience, it’s riveting. Perfect sentence after perfect sentence that pull a tide of emotion up in your chest.
Of all the books on this list, I think Sula is the one in which the girls’ mothers play the most meaningful role. They’re characters in the novel as well, so you get to see Nel and Sula, and their friendship, in the context of their daughterhood. This contributes to the sense of understanding between the friends. They are uniquely witness to each other’s lives. The characters have a profound, private channel of communication between them that I recognize from friendships in life and have been told about in fiction, but has rarely ever felt so real to me in a book.
Sula is among Jessie Rosen's six books featuring superstitions, Nikita Lalwani's top ten platonic friendships in fiction, Lucy Jago's five best female friendships, and John Green's six favorite coming-of-age books.
--Marshal Zeringue