IMAGINARY GIRLS

"Ruby said I'd never drown not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone's bottomless backyard pool... It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body found that night wouldn't be, couldn't be mine."

Chloe's older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can't be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby's friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns home two years later, a precarious and deadly balance waits. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood. Imaginary Girls is a masterfully distorted vision of family reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, laced with twists that beg for their secrets to be kept. Nova Ren Suma has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the MacDowell Colony. Her short stories for adults have been published in multiple literary journals, including Small Spiral Notebook, Orchid, and Gulf Coast, and she has ghostwritten more than seventeen children's books, media tie-ins, and middle-grade series novels for Sterling Publishing and Penguin Young Readers Group. She is also the author of the middle grade novel Dani Noir (Aladdin 2009), in which 13-year-old Dani's obsession with film noir proves helpful in real life as she deals with a mystery at the movie theater.