When Catherine Morrow is admitted to the Esther Percy School for Girls, it's on the condition that she reform her ways. But that's before the beautiful and charismatic Skye Butterfield, daughter of the famous Senator Butterfield, chooses Catherine for her best friend. Skye is in love with danger and the thrill of breaking rules, taking risks, and crossing boundaries, no matter the stakes. The problem is, the stakes keep getting higher, and Catherine can neither resist Skye nor stop her from taking down everyone around her.
De Gramont's chilling novel is a portrait of the seductions of adolescence in all their beauty and terror. Caught in this alluring world, the girls of Esther Percy are optimistic and willful, loving and selfish, daring and cruel-all the while believing they're utterly indestructible.
Nina de Gramont is the author of the story collection Of Cats and Men, which was a Book Sense selection and won a Discovery Award from the New England Booksellers Association. Her first novel, Gossip of the Starlings, was also a Book Sense pick. She is the coeditor of an anthology called Choice and the author of several young adult novels. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. Find her at www.ninadegramont.com.
"De Gramont skillfully sustains a tension that leads to an explosive ending while providing us with characters that go well beyond many recent examples of upper-crust East Coast teenage life. Think Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis with the wisdom of hindsight....A compelling coming-of-age novel....[Gossip of the Starlings] excels in its honest depiction of the interrelationships among teens and with their families and circumstances."-Library Journal "The kind of smart and riveting read that fans of a certain kind of campus drama-think Donna Tartt's The Secret History - will devour...There's romance, betrayal, a gorgeous scholarship boy and a spot-on rendering of the queasy regret you sometimes feel when friends from separate orbits meet. Grab this one and share it with your teenage daughter." -People, four stars
"It's a rare book that draws you into the tiny, idiosyncratic world of its characters so completely, and de Gramont's descriptions are often so vivid you'll want to give them a closer read...grade: A-."-The Washington Post
"Sparkles with an intense exuberance . . . it trumps Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace...Gossip of the Starlings will join that shelf reserved for literary classics." -Providence Sunday Journal
