American Girls
A Novel
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ISBN10: 1250133823
ISBN13: 9781250133823
Trade Paperback
304 Pages
$16.99
CA$22.99
Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood, and she's had it with her life at home. So Anna "borrows" her stepmom's credit card and runs away to Los Angeles, where her half-sister takes her in. But LA isn't quite the glamorous escape Anna had imagined.
As Anna spends her days on TV and movie sets, she engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls—and although the violence in her own life isn't the kind that leaves physical scars, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present.
In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the B-list in LA, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America—in short, on the B-list of life. Alison Umminger writes about girls, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't, in a way not often seen in YA fiction.
Reviews
Praise for American Girls
"Two new novels explore the story of the Manson murders by shoving the ringleader to the side and putting the girls (and girlhood itself) at the center of the narrative: The much-discussed The Girls by Emma Cline, and the less-analyzed, though no less worthy, American Girls by Alison Umminger. Cline and Umminger take a crime that seems impossible to understand, and show the girls behind it being fueled by feelings that are all too familiar."—The Atlantic
"Messy, honest, and unflinchingly real. I can't get this book out of my head. I don't want to get this book out of my head."—Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
"I read American Girls in parallel with Emma Cline's The Girls and it provided a masterful one-two punch. An extraordinary book, with empathy and heart to spare."—Jeff Zentner, author of The Serpent King
“Alison Umminger doesn't pull any punches in her debut: Funny, sad, often surprising, and just damned authentic. I know I won't be the only one who didn't want Anna's glittery-dark Hollywood summer to end.”—Emily M. Danforth, author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post
"A razor-sharp commentary on our culture, observed with keen wit from the perspective of one honest and complex American girl. An insightful, original take on the coming-of-age story."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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1
I would never have gone after my mother with a knife, not while a credit card was cleaner and cut just as deep. It’s not like I was going after her at all—mostly, what I wanted was...