New girls Val and Chloe don’t fit in at their fancy private school, Garfield, in Manhattan. Forming a close friendship, they ditch school, visit cemeteries and thrift shops and have sleepovers during which they confide all their secret thoughts. Lately, Val has all kinds of questions, especially about sex, so she turns to the two people who have always given her the most honest answers possible: her mother and Chloe. When they don’t have the answers, Val starts to think that maybe she’s not normal at all. Because she has some other feelings for Chloe, feelings she never expected to have. Would Chloe think those feelings were wrong? And her biggest question of all: How do you separate loving someone as a friend and the other kind of love or do they cross over sometimes? Originally published in 1978 when Deborah Hautzig was a student at Sarah Lawrence College, I didn’t know it existed until this year and, as a fan of coming-of-age stories, I found a copy and it jumped to the top of my TBR pile. I’m glad it happened. Told in a brisk and breezy style – I have to assume, from what happens, that Val is about 16 or 17 – that doesn’t feel dated at all (though some of the prevailing attitudes are) and it cracks along at a great pace. Val makes for a great narrator, quirky and deep and charmingly idealistic. Chloe is equally good, though we only see her as Val does, as “some mythical, mysterious girl that everyone wonders about.” Their lives, amidst the privilege of 70s New York – they’re two of the few kids in their class who don’t go away for the holidays to somewhere impossibly glamorous and sunny – see the dark side too, with deaths in the family, explorations of grief, handsy older men and boys their own age who push too far sometimes. But the girls are tough and resourceful, which helps when the lesbian aspect of the plot kicks in. While it’s a key point of the book, it never feels like Hautzig is hammering you over the head and the girls deal with it well. More than anything, it’s about friendship and the kind that fizzles through teenaged years, when the people you’re with are the best people you’ve ever known – and ever will – and nothing will ever stop that. Most of us, sadly, know that a lot of those friendships will fade as adult life intrudes but we can only hope, as Val does and Chloe promises, that this won’t be the case here. Speaking of which, the title comes from Chloe’s nickname for Val – they call each other lovely names all the way through. Beautifully written, occasionally melancholic and poignant, this is an excellent novel and I really wish I’d discovered it much, much earlier. Very much recommended.