Julie Buntin's debut novel follows Cat, looking back as an adult at the year she was fifteen and fell into the orbit of Marlena, her wild and troubled neighbor in rural Michigan. That year held all the firsts that define adolescence: first drink, first drugs, first kiss, first heartbreak. Within a year, Marlena would be dead. Buntin captures the intensity of teenage friendship, the way another person can seem to hold the key to becoming who you want to be. Cat, the narrator, is the good girl drawn to Marlena's recklessness, each enabling the other's worst impulses while genuinely loving each other. The novel moves between past and present, with adult Cat still haunted by Marlena's death and her own culpability. Buntin renders the landscape of northern Michigan with attention to the particular textures of rural poverty and opioid devastation. She shows how economic desperation shapes adolescent choices, limiting possibilities that suburban teens might take for granted. The novel avoids the cliches of troubled-girl narratives by giving both girls interior lives of complexity and contradiction. Buntin writes about addiction and death without sensationalism, about love and regret without sentimentality. The result is a coming-of-age story that takes seriously both the real dangers of adolescence and the ways we survive and fail to survive them.