History Lesson for Girls

by Sheehan, Aurelie

• ISBN13: 9780670037674
• ISBN10: 0670037672
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-06
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

A beautiful and resonant novel about a friendship that shaped a life during a decade of instability Everyone remembers age thirteen. For Alison Glass, it was 1975, the year she moved to Weston, Connecticut, with her bohemian parents and her horse, Jazz. Life was about trying to navigate the hypocrisies of an unfamiliar affluent town and figuring out how she might blend in at school— despite her status as the new girl with a back brace for scoliosis. Kate Hamilton, the popular daughter of an egomaniacal New Age guru—the sham shaman”—and his substance-loving wife, was an unlikely friend, the strong girl Alison regarded as her saving grace. Bonding over their love of horses, they rode away the afternoons, creating a private world for themselves as a way to survive the excesses of their surroundings and the adults who cast them adrift in such a tumultuous time. With the clarity of hindsight, Alison looks back on how the tumult inevitably broke through.Set against the backdrop of the often hilariously tacky and disturbingly reckless 1970s, Aurelie Sheehan’s luminous History Lesson for Girlsis at once an emotional inquest and an elegy for a friendship that meant everything. As Alison traces the giddy highs and crushing lows that made her the person she was at thirteen, a picture emerges of a friendship that simply couldn’t survive the weight of the shadows under which it was forged. Combining the poignancy and elegance of The Virgin Suicideswith the sharp observational eye of The Ice Storm, History Lesson for Girlsis an enchanting tribute to the lingering influence of friendship and significance of personal history.

Author Biography

Aurelie Sheehan is the author of the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant and the novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. The director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, she has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award.