The Fall of Butterflies

Sixteen-year-old Willa is less than psyched to be starting boarding school, and she decides she's going to kill herself. Then she meets Remy, Pembroke Prep's enigmatic, charismatic It Girl, and their friendship gives Willa a purpose in life. Portes excels at the first-person, precociously self-aware, snarky teenage-girl voice. The book's humor is dark and the social commentary biting.

Sixteen-year-old Willa is less than psyched to be starting boarding school on the East Coast at the insistence of her high-powered, absentee mother (not that she's in love with her 646-person hometown, What Cheer, Iowa: "Yup, you heard me. What effing Cheer effing Iowa"). Overwhelmed by the "shoulds" of life, she decides she's going to kill herself. Then she meets Remy, Pembroke Prep's enigmatic, charismatic It Girl, "a person who deeply and truly doesn't give a fuck," and their friendship gives Willa a purpose in life. Portes (Anatomy of a Misfit, rev. 9/14) excels at the first-person, precociously self-aware, snarky teenage-girl voice. The book's humor is dark and the social commentary biting as Willa notes, in her direct-address narration, the excesses of the "haves" around her: her mother lives glamorously in Fontainebleau, France, while Willa and her dad barely scrape by in Iowa; Remy is the epitome of the poor little rich girl; Willa's love-interest's family has its own private island. Willa flirts with being sucked into that world -- taking Ecstasy with her bored, rich friends, for example, while at the same time wondering why they have to bother. Remy's terrible choices throughout (including seducing a teacher) and her descent into drug abuse feel organic rather than histrionic, while Willa's emergence from the dark is hard-fought and believable. elissa gershowitz