Local Girls
A Novel
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3.5 • 20 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the summer's best books by People, Glamour, The Huffington Post, and Pure Wow
Publishers Weekly Book of the Week
Named one of Refinery 29’s “21 New Authors to Watch” in 2015
The first person to break your heart isn’t always your boyfriend. Sometimes it’s your best friend.
Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina have been friends for most of their lives. The girls grew up together in a dead-end Florida town on the outskirts of Orlando, and the love and loyalty they have for one another have been their only constants. Now nineteen and restless, the girls spend empty summer days bouncing between unfulfilling jobs, the beach, and their favorite local bar, The Shamrock. It’s there that a chance encounter with a movie star on the last night of his life changes everything.
Passing through Orlando, Sam Decker comes to The Shamrock seeking anonymity, but finds Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina instead. Obsessed with celebrity magazines that allow them a taste of the better lives they might have had, the girls revel in his company. But the appearance of Lila, the estranged former member of the girls’ group, turns the focus to their shared history, bringing all their old antagonisms to the surface—Lila’s defection to Orlando’s country club school when her father came into some money, and the strange, enchanting boy she brought into their circle, who fundamentally altered dynamics that had been in play for years. By the night’s end, the escalation of these long-buried issues forces them to see one another as the women they are now instead of the girls they used to be.
With an uncanny eye for the raw edges of what it means to be a girl and a heartfelt sense of the intensity of early friendship, Local Girls is a look at both the profound role celebrity plays in our culture, and how the people we know as girls end up changing the course of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zancan's promising debut chronicles the end of a longtime friendship as remembered in flashbacks by 19-year-old Maggie, who's having drinks in a Florida dive bar in the company of two female friends and Sam, a movie star who happens by. After watching the trio trade barbs with some young women from the posh side of town, Sam takes a shine to them: Maggie is ambivalently pregnant, Lindsey is dating someone else's boyfriend, and Nina, despite being sassy and full of personality, is stuck in her mother's house, teaching the odd workout class at the gym. Then in walks Lila, leading Maggie to remember how Lila and Nina were once close friends. Nina and Lila meet as little kids in their working-class neighborhood and begin the sort of intense female friendship that can't be infiltrated by the rest of the clique. It continues even when Lila's dad strikes it rich and Lila recruits another member, Max, an eccentric but charming boy from her new expensive private school, to join their group. Things begin to unravel among Max, Nina, and Lila once Nina begins a prank war, culminating in the undoing of their close-knit unit. Sam's outsider perspective adds an interesting ingredient to this satisfying story. Zancan makes these young women, who are tired of Orlando and one another, into real people, contrasting their rich inner lives with their dead-end town.
