The Girls from Corona del Mar (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Thorpe, Rufi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080417007X ISBN 13: 9780804170079

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Synopsis

Best friends Mia and Lorrie Ann couldn’t be more different; where Mia is reckless and proudly hard-hearted, Lorrie Ann is kind, serenely beautiful, and seemingly immune to the kind of teenage mistakes that Mia can’t help but make.
 
But within a few years, fortunes change. Suddenly, Mia is free to grow up and adventure, falling in and out of love while Lorrie Ann is weighed down by responsibilities at home. And when good, nice, brave Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia must question how well she ever really knew her best friend in the first place.  

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: While much of pop culture might have you believe otherwise, the most important relationship a young woman has is not always with her first love, or even, say, with her father. It is with her best friend, the one to whom she tells everything about her sexual encounters, the one who accompanies her to medical procedures, the one who sometimes forgives but never forgets. As Rufi Thorpe demonstrates so vividly in her debut The Girls from Corona del Mar, the one we grow up with is the one we love forever--even well after we’ve grown apart. Lorrie Ann seems perfect: gorgeous, smart, and charming, while her best friend Mia, while brainy and attractive, has a more deliberative personality, and an alcoholic parent, to boot. If biology were destiny, it would be Lorrie Ann who succeeded most in life--except that bad choices and bad breaks intervened. Over nearly two decades, we watch Mia try to come to terms with her friend’s struggles and to understand why things didn’t go as planned. Occasionally, graduate-student Mia feels pretentious--her obsession with her PhD project, ancient Babylonian myth, is grating--and the way Lorrie Ann’s life unfolds can be contrived. But because of Thorpe’s raw and intelligent voice, this book stays with you. Mia calls her time in school “those seven strenuous years of tugging myself slowly toward excellence,” and explains Lorrie Ann’s attraction to an inappropriate mate this way: “She wanted to pick him up and shake him up and down until all the amazing things inside of him came out . . .[like]. . . the fallen candy from a piñata.” You may not like either of these women all the time, but you’ll likely recognize them, and find it hard to turn away. --Sara Nelson

About the Author:

RUFI THORPE received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, was long-listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She lives in California with her husband and sons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 080417007X
• ISBN 13: 9780804170079
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256