Serious Girls

"When her grandmother insists Maya be sent away to boarding school, the sixteen-year-old feels as if her life has turned a new page. Raised in the remote countryside by her emotionally distant hippie-ish mother, Maya finds herself isolated in the all-girl community. When Rea, another outsider, becomes her friend, the two girls tell each other their life stories, and speculate as to what growing up might mean. How do they become "people" with style and character as opposed to school girls? Their desire to be adults takes them beyond the closed world of the school, into the local town and the city where they experiment--shopping in thrift stores, confronting their fears as they try on new identities, and wondering about sex. Both girls test the precarious line between an emerging sense of self and its total disintegration in the very different relationships from which they eventually escape, wiser and secure once again in their friendship and curiosity about life"--Publisher's description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.