Description: Alice, Corvus and Anabel form an unlikely circle of friends, though each -- for various reasons -- is a motherless, teenaged child. Alice discovered, a couple years before, that her "parents" are in fact her grandparents; Corvus's parents recently died in a freakish accident, as did Anabel's mother.

Alice, the ringleader, comforts Corvus in her loss, and each in turn befriends Anabel, who only lately has moved to Phoenix -- a well-to-do, worldly girl much puzzled by Alice's combativeness and Corvus's quietism.

Over summer vacation these girls explore a world seemingly empty of meaning yet filled with eccentricity and random event: a dog murdered by an enraged neighbor, a man who lusts after the gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife, a young drifter whose luck runs from worse to awful, a sickly piano player for whom Alice develops an attraction, a deer crashing into the swimming pool at a fancy party. Adrift in this desolate, air-conditioned landscape, the natural world thoroughly routed, they volunteer at a nursing home, confound one another and seek out versions of adulthood acceptable to their needs and desires -- which all three, by the end, have at least begun to achieve, in their highly idiosyncratic ways.

A panorama of contemporary life, seen through the looking-glass of adolescence: at once mundane and magical, ominous and comic, a tour de force.

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