What She Saw.: A Novel

Beginning in fifth grade, Phoebe Fine, the daughter of an oboist in suburban New Jersey, finds that love is a risky game to play. There is Roger Mancuso, who offers Phoebe her first cigarette, her first kiss, and her first experience of loss. There is Spitty Clark, the frat boy and inveterate party animal who's a possible criminal but also somehow a man of honor. Later on, as a young woman living in New York, Phoebe crosses the path of arrogant Pablo Miles (né Peter Mandelbaum), who licks her hand moments after they meet. And so it goes, as Phoebe struggles to reconcile her conflicting desires for safety and adventure, sympathy and conquest. Lucinda Rosenfeld relates Phoebe's serial, seriocomic encounters with freshness, range, economy, and emotional precision:

"She understood the jealousy emaciation aroused in other women."
"She couldn't persuade herself to spend an entire hour's salary on a piece of bread and three zucchini rounds."
"Their first date was more like an appointment. To screw."

Unexpected, absorbing, and likely to elicit strong identification among men and women alike, What She Saw . . . serves up acute observations and serious ideas--Phoebe's recognition of her complicity in the disenchantments she endures, the intersection of Eros and ambition--with stealthy charm. The sum of these parts is an intriguing, funny, sharp, and occasionally devastating rendition of that most basic and crucial of human stories: growing up. The vision in What She Saw . . . is perfect.

Lucinda Rosenfeld was born in New York City on the last day of the 1960s. She grew up in New Jersey and attended Cornell University. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Slate, Word, and Talk. She was a nightlife columnist for the New York Post from 1996 to 1998. She lives in Brooklyn.