Smithereens

It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable tale of betrayal and desire.

First sentence: HERE'S THE IMAGE THAT I HAD, THIS IS ALL that I was able to suppose: there was Frankie's big old black Lincoln Continental parked near a caved-in chain link fence at the shadowed end of a cul-de-sac, a back alley someplace lost and out of the way in downtown Des Moines.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

DoubleDay

Editions

1

Pages

320

ISBN

9780385506878

Data source: Wikidata