WILD GIRLS

Kate Riordan fears two things as she grows up in the small Appalachian town of Swan River: that she'll be a frustrated townie forever, or that she'll turn into one of the monstrous Wild Girls that menace the community, throwing flame from their hands. Struggling to better her chances of escaping, Kate attends the posh Swan River Academy and finds herself divided between two worlds: the simple town and its dark twin, a commune off Bloodwort Road, where hippie farming and occult practices led to a disastrous end; and the realm of privilege and achievement at the Academy. Explosive friendships with Mason, a boy from the wrong side of the river, and Willow, a wealthy and charismatic queen bee from school, are slowly pulling her apart. Kate must decide who she is and where she belongs before she wakes up with cinders at her fingertips.

WILD GIRLS is a rich debut with dark atmosphere, beautifully drawn characters, and language that is as lovely as it is menacing. The deft descriptions of high school relationships bring to mind Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why and the dizzying sense of a town under the sway of myth and monster recalls Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement.

Mary Stewart Atwell (she goes by Polly) was born in Roanoke, VA in 1978 and went to Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan. She received her MA in Literature at University of Virginia and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the Best New American Voices and Best American Mystery Stories anthologies. She teaches at Missouri State University and is expecting her first child in September 2011.