A Gorgeous Excitement A Novel

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother's depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible-when her mother isn't lying in bed for days, she's lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan's, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn't help that she's Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents' medicine cabinet.

Freud called cocaine "a gorgeous excitement," but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.