Books To Read if You Love My Brilliant Friend

For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families — the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people” — by the tail end of the 20th century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in — and out of — the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. It is at once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage.