MAKING PRETTY

In Corey Ann Haydu’s gorgeous new novel, 17-year-old Montana is embarking on the most important summer of her life thanks to an intoxicating new friend, a wild first love, and a search for identity that forces her to question the bonds of family and the boundaries of love.

Montana Varren and her sister Arizona are named after the mountainous states their mother left them for. Their mother is only one of the countless women who have left or been left by their father – a plastic surgeon to Manhattan’s socialites, and to his long string of ex-wives and ex-girlfriends.

At seventeen, Montana is determined to distance herself from her father. She models herself instead after her new friend from acting class, 23-year-old Karissa. Karissa is bold, imperfectly beautiful, and unafraid of being vulnerable, and Montana is totally under her spell. But it turns out her father is under Karissa’s spell, too, and history is repeating itself all over again. What is more, Montana and Arizona seem to be growing apart – and Arizona’s recent boob job is further proof that they are not the sisters they used to be.

Enter Bernardo. He is serious, smart, and spontaneous, and he looks at Montana in the way she wants to be seen. Together they dye their hair pink, get tiny matching tattoos, and fall in love. For the first time, Montana understands the ways you can become both lost and found in somebody else. But when that love becomes everything, where does that leave the rest of Montana’s imperfect life? Corey Ann Haydu, author of OCD Love Story (Simon Pulse, 2013) and Life By Committee (KT Books, 2014), grew up in the Boston area but now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she drinks mochas and uses a lot of Post-it notes, habits she picked up while earning her MFA at the New School.