Vendela Vida

Raised by her father after the disappearance of her mother, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa discovers upon her father's death that he had not been her father at all, a finding that drives her to leave her fianc and travel to the Arctic to discover the truth about her heritage. Reprint.

A Radio 4 Book at Bedtime'The hottest young writer in US fiction' -- GuardianWhen Clarissa Iverton was fourteen years old, her mother disappeared leaving Clarissa to be raised by her father. Upon his death, Clarissa, now twenty-eight, discovers he wasn't her father at all. Abandoning her fiance, Clarissa travels from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle - to Lapland. There, under the northern lights, Clarissa not only unearths her family's secrets, but also the truth about herself.

Vendela Vida's fearless, critically acclaimed fiction debut follows the unpredictable recovery of a young woman as she tries to make sense of her life after an encounter at gunpoint. Accosted one afternoon in Riverside Park by a man who doesn't want to die alone, Ellis, a young grad student, talks her way out of the situation by reciting poetry to her desperate captor. He lets her go, but is she free? Rejecting the overtures of her kind-hearted boyfriend, the police, and the suitors who would like to save her, Ellis finds herself unable to escape the event. She leaves the city to visit her family; joins her mother on a medical mission to the Philippines. When she returns, Ellis discovers something more about life-perhaps even how to take back her own.

In a fascinating look at how young women are coming of age in America, Vendela Vida's Girls on the Verge explores a variety of rituals that girls have adapted or created in order to leave their childhoods behind. Vida doesn't just observe the rituals, she actively participates in them, going as far as spending a week at UCLA to experience rush--she emerges a Tri-Delt. She also goes to Miami to learn about the "quince" (the Latin American celebration of a girl's fifteenth birthday), to Houston to take part in a debutante ball, to Los Angeles and San Francisco to talk to female gang members, to Salem, Massachusetts, to interview a coven of witches, and to Las Vegas to watch young brides take the plunge--some of them in drive-through wedding chapels. With humor, insight, and illuminating detail, she explores girls' struggles to forge an identity and secure a sense of belonging through various rituals--rituals that they embrace without necessarily understanding the comforts they seek or the repercussions of their often all-too-adult choices.