Best friends Mia and Lorrie Ann couldn’t be more different; where Mia is reckless and proudly hard-hearted, Lorrie Ann is kind, serenely beautiful, and seemingly immune to the kind of teenage mistakes that Mia can’t help but make.
 
But within a few years, fortunes change. Suddenly, Mia is free to grow up and adventure, falling in and out of love while Lorrie Ann is weighed down by responsibilities at home. And when good, nice, brave Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia must question how well she ever really knew her best friend in the first place.  

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: While much of pop culture might have you believe otherwise, the most important relationship a young woman has is not always with her first love, or even, say, with her father. It is with her best friend, the one to whom she tells everything about her sexual encounters, the one who accompanies her to medical procedures, the one who sometimes forgives but never forgets. As Rufi Thorpe demonstrates so vividly in her debut The Girls from Corona del Mar, the one we grow up with is the one we love forever--even well after weâ??ve grown apart. Lorrie Ann seems perfect: gorgeous, smart, and charming, while her best friend Mia, while brainy and attractive, has a more deliberative personality, and an alcoholic parent, to boot. If biology were destiny, it would be Lorrie Ann who succeeded most in life--except that bad choices and bad breaks intervened. Over nearly two decades, we watch Mia try to come to terms with her friendâ??s struggles and to understand why things didnâ??t go as planned. Occasionally, graduate-student Mia feels pretentious--her obsession with her PhD project, ancient Babylonian myth, is grating--and the way Lorrie Annâ??s life unfolds can be contrived. But because of Thorpeâ??s raw and intelligent voice, this book stays with you. Mia calls her time in school â??those seven strenuous years of tugging myself slowly toward excellence,â?? and explains Lorrie Annâ??s attraction to an inappropriate mate this way: â??She wanted to pick him up and shake him up and down until all the amazing things inside of him came out . . .[like]. . . the fallen candy from a piñata.â?? You may not like either of these women all the time, but youâ??ll likely recognize them, and find it hard to turn away. --Sara Nelson

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