The New Girl - Softcover

Perkins, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330376012 ISBN 13: 9780330376013

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

It is the beginning of the summer holidays in a town in the middle of nowhere. Julia and her best friends Chicky and Rachel are school leavers emerging from their girlhood and waiting for the future. They - and their parents - are excited when Miranda, a charismatic and exotically beautiful woman from the city, arrives to teach a summer class.

Miranda encourages curiosity and independence among her charges, but she also casts a shadow: the lifelong bonds between the girls begin to dissipate; confidences are broken; Julia yearns for the city, for an escape from boys who drink beer and race stolen cars across the gravel down by the bridge. But Miranda has her own doubts and betrayals. She too is asking: when will I be found out?

The New Girl is a novel about girls and the women who shape them; about influence, identity, individual freedom and group responsibility.

About this title

Review:

In her second novel The New Girl, Emily Perkins tells a tale of three indivisible friends brought up in a small town whose comfortable childhood certainties are thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a mysterious and troubling stranger from the city. It is a hot, sultry and unsettling summer in a tiny provincial town where very little happens. Or so it seems. Inseparable friends Julia, Chicky and Rachel finish school and await their exam results, worrying as much about how they will pass the summer as how they will spend the future. Boys are for sex, girls are for true friendship and what to do about now being almost grown up is a pressing matter to be avoided. Unexpectedly into their midst comes the raven-haired, red-lipped Miranda, exuding urbanity and challenging the youth of the town to a risky voyage of collective self-discovery.

In flight from her own messy sexual affairs, Miranda is intrigued by the "threeness" of Julia, Chicky and Rachel, "like crass, mall rat versions of Chekhov's sisters, they seemed utterly different yet very much at ease with one another". Her relentless curiosity extends to their parents, lovers and friends. Gradually Miranda seduces the town and those not seduced are scandalised. None are safe from the emotional upheavals sparked by Miranda's search for the personal tragedies and family secrets on which the small town is built. For some, the consequences will be fatal. For all, they will be irreversible.

The small town, sweltering landscape and unforgiving city are unnamed in The New Girl, giving the novel the enduring feel of a modern fable. Against this archetypal landscape, the emotional terrain of Perkins' characters is sharply drawn in a story that makes tangible the points of connection and rupture between people and their often oblivious impact on each other. In a style that crackles with the hormonal electricity of youth, Perkins has captured exactly the aching expectation of young women on the brink of adulthood. The intimate "threeness" of Julia, Chicky, Rachel--and all their school friends--is challenged at exactly that fork in the road where their deeply entwined amity and enmity is finally divided over who wants to stay and who wants to go. By tracing the pathways of those who attempt to get away, Perkins ensures that the difficulties of escape and the brittle realities of urbanity are not sentimentalised. --Rachel Holmes

Book Description:

Emily Perkins brings her sharp wit and compassionate gaze to small-town life; the result is a compelling and touching read.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0330376012
• ISBN 13: 9780330376013
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272