Some books open by setting a stage. Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman opens by setting a weather. The first pages press in close to a screened-in porch in suburban Ohio, three fifteen-year-old girls draped across a wicker couch in the slow, half-aware way teenagers occupy rooms they have known since childhood. From there the rest of the novel unspools quietly, sometimes deliberately so. It is, by design, a book that prefers texture to plot, and patience to event.
What the book is about, without giving anything away
The premise fits on a sticky note. Mina, Margaret, and Eleanor are best friends in a leafy neighborhood called Doan. They are old enough to walk to each other’s houses, young enough that their mothers still measure their days. They play The Sims for hours. And they borrow each other’s clothes and never give them back. They photograph themselves into existence, post the proof, scrutinize the response.
Then one of them kisses another, and nothing about their geometry survives intact.
The novel is narrated by an adult Mina looking back, which means every adolescent dilemma comes wrapped in a thin layer of grown-up understanding without the adult ever lecturing the girl she used to be. The retrospective frame is light, almost translucent. You feel it more than you see it.
On Feldman’s prose
Sonia Feldman trained as a poet, and the lineage shows on every page. Her sentences are unhurried, willing to stop and tell you about a spiderweb glinting iridescently above a couch, the heat seeping upward into a daughter’s attic bedroom, the way concealer ages on a chin by mid-afternoon. She writes the female body without flinching, the small disasters of puberty alongside the small triumphs, and she writes other girls’ bodies the way they are actually looked at by other girls. Partly with longing. Partly with envy. And partly with the cold appraising eye of someone learning what beauty is for.
A few specifics worth flagging:
- The interiority is unusually rigorous. Mina dissects her own motives in something close to real time, and Feldman lets her be wrong about herself, then right, then wrong again.
- The sensory writing is generous without going gauzy. Humidity sits on skin. Earthworms wriggle across wet sidewalks. Hot laptops have to be held in the air like babies to cool them down.
- The dialogue holds. Margaret, Eleanor, and Mina each have a distinct register, and Feldman catches the way teenage girls wield irony as a defensive instrument.
The Sims thread, which runs the length of the book, does more than period decoration. Through a purple-haired Sim named Ginevra, Mina rehearses desires she cannot yet name out loud. It is not subtle, but it is not heavy either. It is a perfect match for the way a real teenager hides the obvious in plain sight.
Where Girl’s Girl earns its praise
A few highlights worth naming directly.
- The friendship triangle is drawn with painful accuracy. Anyone who has ever been the third in a trio of three will recognise how Mina counts the seconds her friends spend without her.
- Mina’s mother is one of the more interesting maternal figures in recent literary fiction. She is loving, intrusive, smarter than everyone in the room, and the relationship between her and Mina is doing as much quiet work as the friendship plot.
- The queerness arrives without spectacle. Mina’s recognition of her own desire is treated as a personal disturbance rather than a social one, which is a rarer choice than it should be.
- The prose itself rewards re-reading. Phrases settle in the ear hours after you have closed the book.
Where the book stumbles
A four-out-of-five book is almost always one that does most things very well and a few things less well. Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman is no exception, and the fair criticisms are worth repeating.
- The plot is, by design, contained. Readers expecting forward momentum may feel the middle stretches, since several scenes circle the same emotional territory before resolving.
- The Sims sections, while thematically earned, can read as insular if you have never opened the game. Feldman explains as she goes, but the explanations occasionally interrupt the dream of the prose.
- The voice is so steadily attuned to nuance that the rare moments of high drama can feel slightly muted. When something genuinely shocking happens, Mina notices the weather first.
- A few minor characters, including the boys the girls flirt with, function more as scaffolding than as people. Given how richly the three leads are drawn, this is a noticeable contrast.
None of these are deal-breakers. They are the costs of the book’s chosen mode, and most readers will find the trade worth taking.
About the author
Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman is her first novel, but she is not arriving from nowhere. Feldman won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. She also runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, a newsletter that has built a small institutional following among readers who like their inboxes to contain actual poems. The poetry background is visible in every paragraph here, never showily so. It lives in the line breaks of thought, the willingness to leave a sentence unresolved, the patience with a single moment.
She lives in Cleveland, which feels relevant. The Ohio of this novel is observed, not imagined.
If you liked this, try
For readers who finish Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman and want more of its specific weather, a few comparable titles worth picking up:
- Brutes by Dizz Tate, for a similarly observed group of girls in a heat-soaked summer.
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor, for the same kind of slow, exact interior writing about queer longing.
- Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, for the body, the mother, the obsession.
- All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky, for the intensity of a friendship that doubles as a love affair.
- The Idiot by Elif Batuman, for the smart, self-aware narrator who keeps misreading her own heart.
- Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, for the layered adult-looking-back-at-teenage structure.
- Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, for the sensory pleasure and bodily attention.
Final word
Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman is a book about the summer when you first realise that loving one person changes how you love everyone else, yourself included. It is patient, very specific, and not built for readers who want a propulsive read. For readers who want a book that knows what humidity does to a teenager’s mood, what a screen-side-down phone means at three in the afternoon, and what it costs to look at your best friend and finally understand what you are seeing, this debut delivers more than enough to forgive its slower stretches.
It is the kind of book you put down quietly, then pick up again a week later, just to see if the sentences still hold. They do.
