When the school year at tony Nashville Arts and Science ends, Vaughn Vance ditches her upper class friends for a summer of solitude. Content to be alone and work on her photography, Vaughn’s seclusion is disrupted when she meets her new neighbor, Sophie Birch. The two form a tentative friendship, hanging out at Dragon Park with the rest of Nashville’s teens. There, the relationship deepens: Sophie becomes the subject of Vaughn’s artistic experiments and Vaughn becomes the subject of Sophie’s social experimentation as she pushes Vaughn to loosen up and let down her guard. After a fight with her mother, Sophie moves in with Vaughn and her academic parents who embrace Sophie’s wild side — until the girls push each other a step too far. In her debut novel, Susannah Felts perfectly captures the feel of growing up Southern-style, the universal push-pull of adolescent limit testing, and, above all, the intoxicating power that comes with burgeoning creativity.
Susannah Felts is a writer, editor and teacher with roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Her writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including McSweeney's, Another Chicago Magazine, Quarterly West, Pindeldyboz, The Sun, the Chicago Reader and others.
Description:
When the school year at tony Nashville Arts and Science ends, Vaughn Vance ditches her upper class friends for a summer of solitude. Content to be alone and work on her photography, Vaughn’s seclusion is disrupted when she meets her new neighbor, Sophie Birch. The two form a tentative friendship, hanging out at Dragon Park with the rest of Nashville’s teens. There, the relationship deepens: Sophie becomes the subject of Vaughn’s artistic experiments and Vaughn becomes the subject of Sophie’s social experimentation as she pushes Vaughn to loosen up and let down her guard. After a fight with her mother, Sophie moves in with Vaughn and her academic parents who embrace Sophie’s wild side — until the girls push each other a step too far. In her debut novel, Susannah Felts perfectly captures the feel of growing up Southern-style, the universal push-pull of adolescent limit testing, and, above all, the intoxicating power that comes with burgeoning creativity.
**
From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up—While taking pictures in Nashville's Dragon Park, 16-year-old Vaughn Vance meets Sophie Birch, small, lithe, and bad-girl pretty. Sophie hangs with Vaughn to escape her depressing home life with a single mom who is housework challenged. This odd couple become fast friends and Sophie becomes Vaughn's muse. After her mom moves away, she accepts an invitation to move in with Vaughn and her caring parents. The teens remain friends until Vaughn makes the mistake of kissing Sophie's ex-boyfriend, the breakup too new for Vaughn's indiscretion to be seen as anything short of serious disloyalty. The rest of the book is essentially Vaughn consumed with whether Sophie will ever be her friend again, an obsession that flirts with homosexuality at one point. References to pop culture are current but are at times forced attempts to relate to the teen audience, with such adjectives as "gimungus" and "pube-curl" and a drink made from fruit punch and vodka called "Sex on the Rag." The novel loses whatever momentum it had as the characters start school and Vaughn uses photography and the peace of the darkroom to forget about Sophie. The author goes into depth about the process of bringing photos from the shutter to the exhibit, but it is not enough to keep readers' interest.—Stephanie Glass Shteirman, High School in the Community, New Haven, CT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Susannah Felts is a writer, editor and teacher with roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Her writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including McSweeney's, Another Chicago Magazine, Quarterly West, Pindeldyboz, The Sun, the Chicago Reader and others.