History Lesson for Girls
by By Sheehan, Aurelie
Category: Fiction , Humorous , General

Everyone remembers age thirteen. For Alison Glass, it was the year she moved to Weston, Connecticut, with her bohemian parents and her horse, Jazz. Back then life was about trying to navigate the hypocrisies of an unfamiliar affluent town and figuring out how she might blend in at school. Shy, observant, and in a back brace for scoliosis, Alison found strength in an unlikely friendship with Kate Hamilton, the charismatic but troubled daughter of an egomaniacal new age guru - the "sham shaman" - and his substance-loving wife.The year was 1975. As the sincere but comically misguided "Women of History" plan the town's bicentennial celebration (complete with red, white, and blue Porta-Potties), the girls escape into the world of their horses. Seeking refuge from the chaos surrounding them, Alison and Kate ride the trails on the edge of suburbia and make up their own alternate history. Aurelie Sheehan sends us reeling back to our adolescent years, making them feel as real as when we first lived them while deftly revealing their lingering influence on the adults we become. With the clarity of hindsight, Alison looks back on the giddy highs and crushing lows that made her the person she was at thirteen, and the friendship that simply couldn't survive the weight of the shadows under which it was forged.Set against the backdrop of the disturbingly reckless and often hilariously tacky 1970s, History Lessons for Girls is at once an emotional inquest and an elegy for a friendship that meant everything.