Stories of obsession can be boring--all that self-absorption becomes repetitive--but this spare, poignant first novel, translated from the French, is so exquisitely written that you read it in one breathless rush. The suspense is not about what happens. You know from the first chapter that the narrator is a murderer. Sleepless in prison, Charlene, 19, has no regrets about what she did two years ago. In the walls of her cell, she remembers the break with her family (suddenly "no more than a squalid bunch of strangers"), her loneliness, her ecstatic bonding with charismatic Sarah at their elite high school. Then Sarah drops Charlene, bullies her, treats her as a pet, and worse of all, ignores her. Charlene has a brief love affair with a kind, handsome guy, and she almost becomes an ordinary teen, able to love without hatred and obsession, until Sarah beckons, and Charlene is trapped again. The writer is just 20, and her unsettling story brings very close the passionate intensity of teenage friendship and betrayal. Hazel Rochman
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Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls In Trouble
"Brasme's potent debut spirals through the teenage psyche..., featuring a heroine who could be Camus' sinister little sister."
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