AGE OF CONSENT

Boarding school kids get into hijinks.

At the start of this novel, students are arriving for the fall session at Griswold Academy, a fictionalized Connecticut boarding school. “Let me out,” Justine tells her father. “Stop the car!” She doesn’t want anyone to see her with the “wheezing orange Volvo”—Justine comes from a less privileged background than most of her classmates, including Eve, Justine’s soon-to-be new best friend, whose strict parents live on Park Avenue. Brainerd’s debut opens in 1983, and it strains to evoke the charm of that era: David Bowie, shoulder pads, cocaine, and so on. It doesn’t really succeed. Brainerd’s narrative style comes off as flat, her dialogue paper-thin. “It’s Saturday night. There’s nothing to do. I’m bored,” Eve says. Attention alternates between Eve and Justine, but because that narrative voice never changes, it quickly becomes difficult to differentiate between the girls. The reader is told that Eve is culturally sophisticated, Justine sensually aware, but aside from explicit reminders, these traits aren’t readily apparent. A subplot involving another girl inexplicably named India seems quickly sketched and, in the end, unearned: This diversion never quite fits with the rest of the book, and it distracts from what fun might have been had.

Brainerd might have had a beach read in mind, but the novel plods along far more often than it skips.