The friendship between Texas debutantes Cece Beirne and Joan Fortier is close in the way that only young girls can be, so feverish and all-consuming that it feels more like a love storyat least from Ceces end.
Since the first day of kindergarten, shes devoted herself to the dazzling Joan, a heedless blond beauty who blithely flaunts the oil-rich decorum of 1950s Houston society and longs to find a bigger life outside of it.
By high school graduation shes gone, but when she returns a year later somethings changed; her rebellion has curdled into a darker kind of recklessness that Cece cant reach, which only makes her more desperate to try.
DiSclafani gorgeously evokesPartys midcentury setting, and the narrative unfolds much more elegantly than her dense 2013 best-seller,The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls.
We learn Joans secret eventually, but for the reader she remains what shes always been to Cece: a siren and a cipher.B+
