Beautifully written account of two girls who are the closest of friends with a secret, and victims of a time and place. You probably won't like either of them. They are cruel and demanding and complacent in the different ways that teenage girls have mastered such domains. Not to blame the girls, of course - they do what they can with the meager hand they were dealt; this in a sense is a book about survival. Part of me wanted a little more outside of the telling of the secret, more than the account of those early teen years, more of their lives, how they drifted. But the author is always firmly in control of voice, and pace, and plot, and this is not that book.