Sandi Sonnenfeld

Coming Soon

Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye meets Melissa Banks’ Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing in GIRL LOVE, a novel that explores the complexities, richness and betrayals of women’s friendships. Imaginative, ambitious, but also confused about how to negotiate society in the increasingly turbulent America of the 1970s and 80s, Renie Marks seeks love and acceptance from nearly every girl she meets in the hope that she will find that one friend who will fill the distance she feels from her deaf mother. Of course, her desperate need only sets her up to be betrayed by the girls she most admires. The betrayals grow darker as Renie matures--a high school friend pretends she’s dying as a way to sever their relationship, a close college friend marries the man who sexually assaults her--thrusting Renie into an increasingly morally ambiguous world. A primer on the nature of female friendships, Girl Love seeks to capture the rich complexity, duplicity and fierce intimacies women experience every day.

Excerpt from Girl Love:

Some girls use their entire bodies to convey disdain. A certain shrug of the shoulders, a short dismissive wave of the right hand, a big flounce of the hair and whosoever dare ask a question, make a comment or perform an unworthy act clearly knows just exactly what these girls think of it. Still other girls believe sitting on candy-colored plastic chairs in the dingy public school cafeteria, forced to eat limp, lukewarm spaghetti with ketchup, or even worse, mother-made bologna and lettuce sandwiches on whole wheat bread, so utterly beneath them that to develop a particular gesture requires far too much energy. Instead, they rely quite effectively on a single guttural response: “Du-uh?”

Du-uh means this conversation is boring because it doesn’t revolve around me. Du-uh means you’re so obviously an idiot that it’s not worth remarking on. Du-uh means I don’t want to think about the U.S. Constitution, what atoms consist of, or how many times a train would have to run from New York to California to go as many miles as it would take to circumnavigate the globe, because none of that is relevant to my life right now.

As for twelve-year-old Renie Marks, she has the “stare.” Actually, she first learned it from Caroline Roth back in the fourth grade, but she has had many years to perfect it and make it her own.

Renie practices her show of disdain before a mirror in the privacy of the bathroom, a sort of combination stare-glare that consists of jutting her chin out, tightening her mouth, nose and cheeks and hardening her eyes until they shine like cut amber. She aims for a sere, fierce, poisonous gesture that cannot be mistaken for anything else. A stare that can peel the skin off a plum, curdle milk, cause islands to collide. When the boys in her science class throw a dissected frog into her lap, laughing hysterically as the smell of formaldehyde and amphibian guts seeps into her slacks, Renie gives them the stare. It works when her mother tells her to eat more salad, or if her sister Becca bursts into her bedroom excited about some stupid drawing she did in gifted classes. When two girls spread the word in gym class that Renie wears brown to hide the fact that she shit her shorts, the stare is her response. Like a poison dart from an Amazon blowgun felling prey in a single shot, it’s the look that kills. She shoots them the stare and they move on to someone else.

For lately nearly everything Renie encounters feels fraught with danger, some unknown secret almost too exquisitely frightening to contemplate. She creeps cautiously around corners, catching the tail end of conversations about topics she only half-understands. She watches her parents as they do the dishes, her father carefully wiping dry a freshly washed pot, caressing its copper bottom as he watches her mother plunge her rubber glove-encased arms again and again into a mass of creamy soap bubbles in the sink, thick and foamy as meringue. A few minutes later while Renie labors over her math homework, she will watch her parents slowly weave their way down the hallway, her heart stopping each time they turn out yet another light on their way up to their bedroom. Such secrets float inside her, like a ginger ale fizz that never goes flat. She feels giddy and dizzy at the same time; she feels all-knowing and in the dark.