First published 2026
Our narrator has fled to an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard, hoping to reinvent herself as an English literature teacher. She delivers wild lectures that jump from Bleak House to Stalin's childhood to Holocaust trauma while pursuing affairs with locals, including the possibly disgraced male teacher she replaced. Her obsessive analysis of everyone around her masks her desperate search for where her life derailed. When the holidays force her back to her midwestern hometown and overbearing family, she finds herself drunk in a bar on the seventh night of Chanukah. There she encounters the person from her adolescence who may have violated her and destroyed her future. The confrontation she has imagined for years finally arrives, but the catharsis she craves remains elusive. Her mind spirals through the same destructive patterns, questioning whether speaking her truth can actually heal her wounds or if she is doomed to repeat her trauma forever.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Eastern Seaboard, Midwest
Period: 21st-century
304 pages · Hardcover · Astra House
Content warnings: abuse, mental-illness, sexual-assault