I'M THE GIRL

All 16-year-old Georgia Avis ever wanted was to be an Aspera girl.

It’s during the summer that Georgia’s dream of working at members-only resort Aspera comes true—but at a terrible cost and against the wishes of her late mother. After she finds the body of 13-year-old Ashley James, raped and dumped by the roadside, Georgia becomes entangled with Matthew and Cleo Hayes, Aspera’s impossibly beautiful and rich owners, who take her under their wing. Although her first job there seems to be run-of-the-mill admin work and not quite what Georgia knows she deserves, she believes it is only a matter of time until her beauty takes her places. But even while she navigates this world of privilege and power, glamour and deceit, trying to carve a place for herself, she joins forces with Nora, Ashley’s charismatic older sister, to find the culprit. Summers’ latest masterful thriller takes on the world of wealth and privilege to examine questions of power, predatory behavior, and, ultimately, complicity, and agency. Readers are witnesses to a long process of grooming and to what Georgia—a naïve, earnest kid—instead believes she is experiencing. This dissonance in perspective makes for a heartbreaking, brutal, and devastatingly realistic novel. Hopeful notes come with the budding romance between Nora and Georgia. Most characters are White.

A bold, unflinching, and utterly enthralling novel.