Eating the Cheshire Cat

This debut novel knocks down Southern stereotypes, literally and figuratively, with its updated version of the pretty, ambitious belle who wreaks havoc all around her. Sarina Summers, a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Carrie, is an almost picture-perfect teenager except for her crooked pinkies. In a dramatic opening scene, Sarina's mother smashes the offending digits after her daughter's Sweet Sixteen luau party, and then drives her to the hospital to have them reset. Mother and daughter are two of a kind: whatever Sarina learns from her mother, she implements 10-fold. She already has her claws in troubled, self-mutilating Nicole Hicks, the girl next door. Nicole's mother, Mrs. Hicks, was a victim of Sarina's mother's sorority tricks, and she tries to train Nicole to compete with Sarina, but Nicole is all too happy to be Sarina's devoted sidekick. Sarina can't charm everyone, though. At Camp Chickasaw, she wins the undying hatred of scrawny Bitty Jack Carlson, when she wriggles her way out of an embarrassing moment by falsely accusing Bitty Jack's janitor father of molestation. Ellis tracks the fortunes of all three girls from their first discovery of sexual longing to the novel's explosive climax, which coincides with Sarina's crowning as homecoming queen of the University of Alabama. Using her disturbing tale to dissect female obsession with beauty, acceptance, friendship and sex, Ellis displays substantial insight into the nuances of Southern living, social climbing and mother and daughter relationships. But it is her deliciously catty humor and breathless storytelling that turn the Alabama of this Southern gothic satire into a chillingly funny Wonderland, complete with three desperate Alices. Agent, Chris Calhoun. (Jan.)