Although I'm a longtime fan of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, this is actual the first piece of her fiction that I've read. Giving how much (both qualitatively and quantitatively) Prose thinks about the writing of fiction, I was expecting something interesting and I was not disappointed. Prose has created a wonderful narrator in Maisie Willard, not so much in her voice (I've read other YA narrators that frankly blow Maisie out of the water for voice) but rather in her ability to create an unreliable narrator that twists facts by lying not to the reader, but to herself. We all remember how fast rumours can spread in high school, but what happens when the various stories don't match up and you've told others (and yourself) so many versions that you can't quite remember which one is really what happened?
