Bromley Girls - Softcover

An engaging, complex story, beautifully told. Readers will empathize with Emily's struggle to come to terms with her identity. Martha Mendelssohn is a thoughtful storyteller. A gorgeous debut. --Taylor Morris, author of BFF Breakup With Bromley Girls, Martha Mendelsohn has written a novel that manages to be funny and sincere, poignant and light. In its telling of the story of the new girl, a Jewish one at that, at a WASPy 1950s prep school, the book deftly weaves teenage alienation with friendship and budding romance. Most of all, in its comic, very human details, from the crushes on James Dean to the clothes the girls wear, the novel rings true. --Asher Price, author of Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity

It's 1955 and fourteen-year-old Emily Winter's promising start at Bromley, a posh, academically-challenging Manhattan girls' school, threatens to turn sour when her new friend Phoebe Barrett joins an anti-Semitic club founded by the popular and snobby Cressida Whitcroft. But how can Emily stay angry with Phoebe, who shares Emily's fascination with knights and the Middle Ages, when Phoebe has put herself on a dangerously stringent diet and is sinking into an ever-deeper obsession with losing weight? In a story about the search for identity and the triumph of friendship over bigotry, Emily discovers a knack for leadership as she copes with Phoebe's snubs, a newborn brother, a know-it-all classmate addicted to true-love magazines, a whiz kid who thinks he's James Dean, a fifteen-year-old fencer with an intriguing scar, and a surprise assignment that brings everyone together and helps banish prejudice at Bromley.