Soho Press

The acclaimed novel of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of 1970, with a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal—fierce, gifted, and dangerously magnetic—lives in a once-elegant, now-crumbling townhouse with her cultish jazz-pianist father and the women who orbit him. Her mother is gone. Her father’s best friend hovers too close. And Rainey, left largely to her own devices, must learn to navigate desire, betrayal, and vulnerability in a city that shimmers with promise and threat. As she gathers friends and misfits into her orbit, Rainey tests the limits of who she can become—sometimes a rebel, sometimes a criminal, always a girl determined to recreate herself as both an artist and a young woman in a fractured world.

Each book in the Rainey Royal cycle can be read on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.