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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

BENNINGTON GIRLS ARE EASY

Charlotte Silver

Bennington Girls Are Easy is a novel about female friendships—how one word from a confidante can lift you up or tear you down and how difficult it is to balance someone else's devastatingly funny lapses in judgment with your own professional and personal missteps. The author dazzles with a ruefully funny coming-of-age novel that follows two recent Bennington grads who are determined to make it in the Big Apple.

Bennington College, founded in 1932 as a suitable refuge for the wayward daughters of good families, maintains its saucy reputation for attracting free spirits. There, acres outnumber students, the faculty is composed of fading hippie and clothing is largely optional. Or, as J. D. Salinger put it in Franny and Zooey: a Bennington-type "looked like she'd spent the whole train ride in the john, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress." Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst met in high school but cement what they ardently believe will be everlasting friendship on Bennington's idyllic Vermont campus. Graduation sees Sylvie moving to New York City, where, later on their twenties, Cassandra joins her. These early, delirious years are spent decorating their Fort Greene apartment with flea market gems, dating "artists", and trying to figure out what they're doing with their lives. The girls are acutely and caustically observant of the unique rhythms of the city but tone deaf to their own imperfections, which eventually drives a wedge between them. Equal parts heartfelt and hilarious, Bennington Girls Are Easy is a novel about female friendships—how with one word from a confidante can lift you up or tear you down—and how difficult it is to balance someone else's devastatingly funny lapses in judgment with your own professional and personal missteps. A graduate of Bennington College, CHARLOTTE SILVER is the author of Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood, and the YA novel, The Summer Invitation.

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Book Published 2015-07-15 by Doubleday

Comments

BENNINGTON GIRLS ARE EASY has been named one of Refinery 29’s New Authors You Need to Know for 2015.

Silver excels at characterization and deftly blends tragedy and comedy.

A devastatingly witty Sex in the City, circa 2010, revolving around a group of Bennington girls as they become women of the world. But in this world, the economy sucks, jobs and affordable apartments are scarce, real men are scarcer, and best friends are friends forever, until trouble drives them apart. Charlotte Silver gets the secret language of female friendship just right, and the heartbreak of broken engagements and love gone bad, while she skewers so many cultural shrines: the farmer's markets of artisanal Brooklyn, dates at the Harvard Club, older men and the young women who sleep with them. I kept thinking that Muriel Spark would love this book, and Dorothy Parker, too.

In this wickedly comic, deliciously mischievous and purely pleasurable novel, Charlotte Silver has found the perfect distance and tone, enabling her to mock youth's presumptions, vanities and self-delusions while maintaining overall fondness for her characters. The contemporaneous details are spot-on, the aphoristic wit shrewd and universal. These Bennington girls' follies are recognizably our own.

Charlotte Silver’s breezy novel BENNINGTON GIRLS ARE EASY has been named one of Entertainment Weekly’s "Ten Must-Reads of Summer”!

In Bennington Girls Are Easy, Charlotte Silver frames the plight of 20-somethings trying to survive in New York with such a witty, poetic eye, petty arguments frequently take a surprisingly profound turn in this juicy novel.

This is such a delightful, affectionate satire of a best friendship gone awry. Charlotte Silver has a sharp eye for the deeply goofy consumption patterns of the young bourgeois bohemian (yes to artisanal lemonade; no to Trader Joe's frozen hors d'oeuvres), and for the ill-advised love affairs they pursue. This book is honest, caustic and a lot of fun.