A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT by Cynthia Weiner (the words Freud used to describe a cocaine high) is Sweet Bitter meets The Girls with some Girl, Interrupted thrown in.
A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT
by Cynthia Weiner
Crown, TBD
Set against the summer of 1986 in NYC, beginning with the gruesome razor blade slashing of an aspiring model outside a midtown bar in June, and ending with the strangulation of an 18 year old girl in Central Park whose half-clothed body was discovered behind the Metropolitan Museum – Nina Jacobs starts her summer with two goals: to lose her virginity before she goes to college, and avoid provoking her mother’s depression fueled rages at home. Temping meaningless jobs by day, and hanging out at Flanagans, the bar on the upper east side that is a magnet for the private school set, during this summer Nina will discover just how dangerous the world is for women, but also that she is tougher than anyone, including herself, thinks.
Cynthia Weiner’s short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, Open City, and Epiphany, and one of them, « Boyfriends, » received a Pushcart Prize. She has an M.F.A. from Brown University and is the Assistant Director of The Writers Studio in New York where she teaches fiction writing. A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT was inspired by Weiner’s teenage years on the Upper East Side in the 80s.
Shivering and bruised, a teen wakes up on the side of a dirt road with no memory of how she got there—or who she is. A passing officer takes her to the police station, and not long after, a frantic man arrives. He’s been searching for her for hours. He has her school ID, her birth certificate, and even family photos. 
Hwa Young was just ten years old when imperial forces destroyed her rebel moon home. Now, six years later, she is a citizen of the very empire that made her an orphan. Desperate to shake her rebel past, Hwa Young dreams of one day becoming a lancer pilot, an elite group of warriors who fly into battle using the empire’s most advanced tech—giant martial robots. Lancers are powerful, and Hwa Young would do anything to be the strong one for once in her life. When an attack on their boarding school leaves Hwa Young and her classmates stranded on an imperial space fleet, her dreams quickly become a reality. As it turns out, the fleet is in dire need of pilot candidates, and Hwa Young—along with her brainy best friend Geum, rival Bae, and class clown Seong Su—are quick to volunteer. But training is nothing like what they expected, and secrets—like the fate of the fleet’s previous lancer squad and hidden truths about the rebellion itself—are stacking up. And when Hwa Young uncovers a conspiracy that puts their entire world at risk, she’s forced to make a choice between her rebel past and an empire she’s no longer sure she can trust.
Yun is a ninety-year-old woman recounting her time growing up in the Phoenix Pencil Company in 1940s Shanghai. While Japan invades China, Yun’s cousin moves in with them, and the two develop a competitive yet loving relationship. When the government discovers their family can magically Reforge a pencil’s words, bringing its words back to life, the cousins are separated and forced into a life of betraying stories in order to survive.
It’s an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and of course, inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.