What Girls Learn: A Novel

In her debut novel, What Girls Learn, author Karin Cook takes familiar--and familial--territory and turns it neatly on its head. Tilden, the 12-year-old narrator of Cook's tale, and her 11-year-old sister Elizabeth are suddenly uprooted from a hardscrabble life in Atlanta and moved to Long Island when their mother falls in love with a man they've never met. Fortunately, Nick turns out to be a kind man, and the girls' enjoy a temporary stability. Then Frances, their mother, discovers a lump in her breast. While she is hospitalized, her predatory brother arrives, and the sisters are thrown back upon a bond that, although stretched by sibling rivalry, can never be broken.

Karin Cook depicts the inner lives of girls on the verge of adolescence with tremendous insight, and in Tilden, she has found a narrator both eloquent and observant. What Girls Learn explores notions of family and femininity and the transcendence of love, even in the face of loss.