LONGCUTS

Moving from Chicago to the suburbs turns a teenage girl’s life upside down in Doyle’s latest YA novel.

After her parents split up, Ella Bennett and her mom leave their home in the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Parkfor a tiny Cape Cod cottage in the Illinois suburb of Snow Ridge. When Ella first encounters fellow sophomore Grace Childs, she knows that she has nothing in common with the “tall, gorgeous, undoubtedly popular” girl who lives in the mansion next door. When Grace’s mom offers Ella a ride on her first day of the school year, it leads to an invitation to join Grace’s table at lunch; the table itself is marked with a brass plaque honoring the Childs family. The girls’ relationship takes a dark turn once Ella joins the cheer team and Grace fails to make the cut. A freak fall sidelines Ella from the squad, and it turns out to the beginning of all-out war between the new girl and the queen bee. At the same time, Ella is navigating her parents’ divorce—sometimes wisely, sometimes not. Her father’s new girlfriend, Cynthia, becomes Ella’s ally, but can Ella follow Cynthia’s questionable advice and still live with herself? Along the way, she learns who her real friends are—and what it means to be a real friend to others. As she did in Points (2020), Doyle takes the social and emotional lives of young people seriously in this novel. She explores what it means to be an outsider in a community with a long-established hierarchy while also showing how Ella adapts to her family’s new shape. Several of the choices that the protagonist makes during her feud with Grace have serious consequences, and some readers might feel like the people around her—her mom, her principal, the one cheerleader who is kind to her—let her off too easily. Other readers, though, will find her redemptive arc to be satisfying.

A coming-of-age story with high drama and plenty of heart.