THE OTHER'S GOLD

Four women have their friendship tested by a series of traumatic revelations.

As first-year students at the prestigious Quincy-Hawthorn College, four suitemates are thrown together and enter into an intensely close friendship. Lainey, a mixed-race adoptee, devotes herself to political activism and short-lived romances. Alice comes from an upper-crust white family and is on track to be a star athlete and pre-med student. Ji Sun, from Korea, is cocooned by her extraordinary wealth, and Margaret, from a lower-middle-class white Missouri family, by her extraordinary beauty. Ames structures this, her debut novel, in four parts, each of which corresponds, like an ethics textbook, to a different moral quandary centered on one of the women. In the novel’s opening section, “The Accident,” Alice struggles to keep secret from her new roommates a childhood trauma that wracks her with guilt. Further into their time at Quincy-Hawthorn, in the second section, “The Accusation,” the women learn that Ji Sun plans to accuse her professor of sexual harassment. In the final two parts, “The Kiss” and “The Bite,” Margaret and then Lainey—now new wives and mothers—inflict trauma on children in very different ways. Written in a deft omniscient narration, the novel’s first half can sometimes blur the characters together within its slippery point of view, and the crushes and drunken exploits seem like overly familiar snapshots from collegiate life. But the novel sharpens when the women come into independent adulthood, and though the structure emphasizes the sameness of their transgressions—the way all of us will cross lines for morally complicated reasons—the characters finally bloom into vibrant individuality, and the book fulfills its promise to investigate the question Margaret asks herself near the book’s finale: “Did loving so much mean you knew more about hatred?”

A messy, but ultimately memorable, look at the moral gray areas that govern our choices.