The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley (Knopf). This striking novel tracks the friendships among a group of teen moms as they struggle and strive in a small, gossipy beach town in Florida’s sticky-hot panhandle. Simone, their strong-willed leader, gave birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend’s truck. A young woman named Adela joins the pack after her parents send her away from Indiana, in shame, to live with her grandmother. Her arrival causes friction—one mom falls in love with her; Simone, on the other hand, is not so sure that Adela belongs—until a series of crises forces the women to see that, together, they can be “mother and child and freed, all at once.”
The Scrapbook, by Heather Clark (Pantheon). Anna, an American student at Harvard, falls deeply and unaccountably in love with Christoph, who is on exchange from Germany, in this melancholy début novel. Clark’s narrative begins in 1996, but her characters’ entanglement develops under the long shadow of the Second World War, during which their grandfathers fought on opposing sides. As Anna contends with her infatuation, and with the weight of history, Christoph alternately embraces and eludes her, creating a sense that nothing—in their relationship, in the world—is what it seems. Full of references to music, literature, and philosophy, as well as heady discussions of Nazism and the complexities of national memory, this ambitious book, by an accomplished biographer of Sylvia Plath, ultimately fails to connect the stakes of its central romance to those of the larger questions that loom throughout.