“A total time machine–I loved it.”–Maria Semple, New York Times bestselling author of Where’d You Go, BernadetteNamed One of the Best Books of the Summer by Good Morning America, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, and PopSugarA daringly honest, sexy debut novel about three young women coming of age in 1980s New England and New York–a bingeable summer readIt’s 1983. David Bowie reigns supreme, and … York–a bingeable summer read
It’s 1983. David Bowie reigns supreme, and downtown Manhattan has never been cooler. But Justine and Eve are stuck at Griswold Academy, a Connecticut boarding school. Griswold is a far cry from Justine’s bohemian life in New Haven, where her parents run a theater and struggle to pay the bills. Eve, the sophisticated daughter of status-obsessed Park Avenue parents, also feels like an outsider amidst Griswold’s preppy jocks and debutantes. Justine longs for Eve’s privilege, and Eve for Justine’s sexual confidence. Despite their differences, they form a deep friendship, together grappling with drugs, alcohol, ill-fated crushes, and predatory male teachers.
After a tumultuous school year, Eve and Justine spend the summer in New York City where they join Eve’s childhood friend India. Justine moves into India’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment and is pulled further into her friends’ glamorous lives. Eve, under her parents’ ever-watchful eye, interns at a SoHo art gallery and navigates the unpredictable whims of her boss. India struggles to resist the advances of a famous artist represented by the gallery. All three are affected by their sexual relationships with older men and the power adults hold over them, even as the young women begin to assert their independence.
A captivating, timeless novel about friendship, sex, and parental damage, Amanda Brainerd’s Age of Consent intimately evokes the heady freedom of our teenage years.
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This character-driven saga of heartache and discovery will spirit you away. Ms. Brainerd excels at crafting vivid descriptions and a strong sense of place sure to transport the reader to the whirling scene of nineteen-eighties New York in all of its glory. Come for the wonderful characters, stay for the David Bowie references. There’s a dishy quality to the writing, the dialogue especially, that makes it easy to get lost in the worlds of Eve and Justine. A stellar debut that brings to life a fascinating piece of history.
A total time machine — I loved it.
Brainerd eloquently captures the struggles of her teenage characters while simultaneously providing insight into their screwed up parents. Familiar, funny, and totally unforgettable.
In her striking debut, Amanda Brainerd conjures a cast of vibrant and troubled young characters who find themselves thrown into an adult world of money, treachery, and sexual politics. She captures the raw and painful tangle of female adolescence with emotional honesty and precision. Set in the 1980s, a tumultuous Age of Consent, and brimming with evocative detail, the story travels across the glittering and gritty landscapes of an elite boarding school and New York City, leading its vulnerable protagonists to the discovery that charmed lives often hide the most dangerous circumstances.
A witty, perceptive, and compulsively readable book about the cool girls I’d wish I’d been in high school.
I liked this book, but I did not love this book. I thought I would because it’s the 1980s and I loved the ’80s.
This is the story of Justine and Eve, two young women at a prestigious high school in Connecticut and all the quirky people that they meet. Justine struggles with financial matters (her parents don’t send her enough money) while Eve is at the other end of the spectrum and has oodles of money. They form a fast friendship.
This is more character driven than plot driven. There is a lot of sex and drugs (again, it IS the 80s) but no real depth to any of the characters. Even the girls’ parents (as well as the parents of some of their friends) were just as messed up. I really thought something was going to happen at the end but it just ended.
Amanda Brainerd’s AGE OF CONSENT follows three teens, Justine, Eve, and India, through a pivotal year. Justine and Eve are new sophomores at their Connecticut boarding school, Griswold, trying to figure out boarding-school culture, class divisions, and their own identities. They quickly become friends, and find a compatible group in new friends Clay and Stanley. Because the novel is set in the early 1980s and almost all the adults in the girls’ world are either AWOL, too busy social climbing, or actively preying on young people, both Justine and Eve soon find themselves in compromising and dangerous situations. India, the novel’s third point-of-view character, is, though privileged, even more neglected than Eve and Justine–her mother has died and her dad is a hapless drug addict–and she’s on her own in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. When summer arrives, the novel switches its focus to New York: Justine moves in with India, and Eve lands an internship at a Soho gallery that represents the artist who was once in love with India’s mother.
This is very much a coming-of-age story, one firmly grounded in its place and time. Brainerd has a keen eye for period details, and for the intricacies of prep-school, New York City, Connecticut, and Hamptons cultures, and varying degrees of privilege–the uptown, monied but social-climbing lives of Eve’s parents; the more Bohemian lives of Justine’s parents, who run a theater in New Haven; of India’s free-spirited mother, and of Clay’s mother Barbara, a hippieish artist who wants to party with the kids. The novel is both nostalgic for and clear-eyed about the time and place, depicting both the freedom that teens had back then, and the many ways that these neglectful parents and predatory teachers damaged their kids. This is an ambitious novel, and it takes on several big themes, but it also moves quickly through this year in these characters’ lives. I was a teen in the early Eighties, and I loved revisiting this time in the novel and thinking about how much has changed for high-school kids, and how much hasn’t changed. I’d also add that if you’re a fan of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep or Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan, this is the novel for you.