White Nights in Split Town City

In DeWitt's debut, 12-year-old Jean comes of age in the summer of 1990. Jean is a voraciously observant young woman. She can't help but stare. "You don't look at people like that," her mother scolds her, but how else is she to understand the world she lives in? When her mother suddenly vanishes without explanation, the town's horses begin dying from disease, and the Gulf War gets underway, Jean finds herself on the crumbling edge of her childhood. She discovers that people are not as they seem, that there is danger in innocence and innocence in what appears to be most dangerous. Jean comes to know herself by watching her neighbors, her town, and her family, learning what they reveal and what they keep hidden. Along with an abandoned boy whom she befriends, Jean builds a surreptitious fort and begins to discover the hidden secrets and desires of her neighbors in the Bottom Feeder, her ominously named New England town. Jean also learns that secrets can also be things we keep from ourselves. DeWitt's novel is a powerful and haunting debut from an author who has an ear for lyricism and an eye on what is hidden just beneath the surface. (Aug.)