"A gorgeous book of nerve endings, Rachel B. Glaser's Paulina & Fran
manages to capture the rawness and restlessness of youth, friendship,
and artists in the making. She gets to the bone of those quixotic,
beautiful years when everything matters, most things hurt, and you have
no idea exactly who you are. I've never read anything quite like it." --
Christopher Bollen, author of Orient
A story of friendship, art, sex, and curly hair: an audaciously witty
debut tracing the pas de deux of lust and love between two young,
uncertain, conflicted art students.
At their New England art school, Paulina and Fran both stand apart from
the crowd. Paulina is striking and sexually adventurous--a
self-proclaimed queen bee with a devastating mean-girl streak. With her
gorgeous untamed head of curly hair, Fran is quirky, sweet, and sexually
innocent. An aspiring painter whose potential outstrips her confidence,
she floats dreamily through criticisms and dance floors alike. On a
school trip to Norway, the girls are drawn together, each disarmed by
the other's charisma.
Though their bond is instant and powerful, it's also wracked by
complications. When Fran winds up dating one of Paulina's ex-boyfriends,
an incensed Paulina becomes determined to destroy the couple, creating a
rift that will shape their lives well past the halcyon days of art
school.
Crackling with bon mots and knowing snapshots of that moment when the
carefree cocoon of adolescence opens into the permanent, unknowable
future, Paulina & Fran is both a sparkling dance party of a novel, and
the debut novel of a writer with rare insight into the complexities of
obsession, friendship, and prickly, ever-elusive love.
