There is a line in Dylan Landis’s lush, fierce, and stunning novel Rainey Royal, that perfectly captures this book’s intense beauty. “Rainey feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck.” Rainey Royal is a chronicle of girlhood as a dangerous, delicate thing. There is edge and tenderness and longing to be found here. Always, though, Landis’s words are a butterfly and a knife—both cutting you open in necessary ways.