I wish that I had known about this book and read it in high school, around the time I read The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted and would pick up any book featuring sad, smart girls with literary interests. I would have liked it much more, the debut-effort flaws in the writing would have been less apparent to me, and it probably would have become one of those books that I developed deep place-associations with: reading it in my bedroom or in the art classroom, waiting for the bell to ring.

Still, I read this in gulps, sinking into the characters' grief. I had expected this to be more of a campus novel, more focused on a codependent and intense friendship among girls obsessed with dead poets. Instead, Wolitzer focuses on only one of the girls, Claire, as she involves herself in the life of her favorite poet's parents, wrecked people who live by the ocean in the aftermath of their daughter's suicide by drowning. Claire cleans their house, sleeps in their daughter's bed, puts on her clothes, and believes that her ghost comes to Claire at night, all the while delving deeper into her grief for the brother she lost to leukemia.

If I had to describe this book in one word, it would be unbalanced. The pacing is off, characters are introduced and more or less discarded, and the tone is confused. But the writing has a hypnotic quality that made me feel fine about investing 215 pages' worth of time. I might try later Wolitzer to see how her style developed.