Our Favorite Authors Choose Their Favorite Summer Reads

The drama inside this novel is devastating. One of my favorite scenes is of 15-year-old Berie and her friend Sils taking cigarette breaks at Storyland, where they are working while school's out, with Sils in her Cinderella dress. This is one of those books that magnify your memories of being a teenager—that kind of gawky—and of summer as the hyphen between one school year and the next, three months of neglect when all kinds of tragic, comic things can happen. I loved the sticky, unchaperoned feeling of being that age.