October 16, 2017
With this story of two very different young women, DeBoard (The Drowning Girls) portrays the lies that people tell to find acceptance and the terrible acts that powerful people casually commit. The story opens in the present with a press conference about a woman’s rape by a U.S. senator. The narrative alternates between this story line and one set in the late ’90s and early aughts, in which poor Kansas girl Megan Mazeros forms a friendship with Connecticut senator’s daughter Lauren Mabrey at all-girls Keale College. Each conceals a painful secret, and when the two are thrown together as roommates, they fall into the habit of using casual lies to paper over their differences, to hide their secrets, and even simply to amuse each other. Megan fabricates a history even more desperate than her real life to impress Lauren, the product of prep schools. Later, Lauren conceals her relationship with a young man that Megan briefly liked. The lies exacerbate the differences between the two until a horrific attack on the Mabrey family island off the coast of Maine shatters their friendship. While the rape looms in the future as a foregone conclusion, DeBoard only slowly reveals the details, so the final revelations are all the more powerful.
November 15, 2017
After her father dies of cancer, leaving behind a life insurance payout, Megan Mazeros pulls up stakes in Kansas and tries to start over as a student at a posh women's college in Connecticut. Her new life, however, might just ruin her.Nursing her grief, and some shame at having helped her father to his final peace, Megan arrives in Scofield late, in the dark, and with no idea how to get to Keale College. Luckily, she stumbles upon charismatic Joe Natolo, a local man who never went to college but finds Megan intriguing, unlike most of the privileged women at the school on the hill. Megan settles into her studies, tolerating her overachieving roommate and seeing Joe around town. After her roommate's suicide attempt, Megan finds she has a new roommate: Lauren Mabrey, reckless daughter of a revered U.S. senator from Connecticut and an overbearing mother. Reeling after her mother broke up her romance with a drug dealer, Lauren is on her last chance at Keale. Lauren and Megan become fast friends, telling each other their deepest secrets and a few lies, and Megan finds herself spending holidays with the Mabreys. One fateful summer, however, a violent encounter snaps every thread, leaving only one friend finishing her degree. With each chapter shifting perspective between Lauren and Megan, DeBoard (The Mourning Hours, 2016, etc.) lets each woman's story reflect and distort the other's, deftly angling the mirror of truth to show each woman's best side. Fourteen years later, what happened that summer night is still unspoken, and the friends have gone their separate ways, but when Megan sees a woman on television accusing Sen. Mabrey of sexual assault, she knows she must break the silence even if it means giving up all hope of ever reconciling with Lauren.A wrenching tale of broken friendship and shattered dreams.
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January 1, 2018
When Megan and Lauren are paired up as roommates at their exclusive women's college, their differences are as easy to spot as their decorLauren's 500-thread-count sheets come from an exclusive catalog; Megan comes with a faded bed-in-a-bag set from Walmart. But their friendship rapidly grows, with each young woman revealing just what she wants to about herself. Megan comes from a lower-middle-class Kansas background; Lauren is the black-sheep daughter of a U.S. senator. Secrets and half-truths surround each character and nearly every scene, perfectly setting up an explosive event when Megan is sexually assaulted on the private island belonging to Lauren's familyan event that changes both girls' lives. DeBoard does a wonderful job creating her realistic and flawed characters, giving even secondary characters a rich backstory and a haunting sense of intrigue. This story particularly resonates now, in the throes of the #MeToo movement.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)