A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.
THESE BODIES BETWEEN US
by Sarah Van Name
Delacorte, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.
This summer, they’re going to disappear.
For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.
Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.
Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves…and do they even want to?
“A lusciously crafted and achingly poignant story about girlhood with a haunting twist that readers will savor. You won’t soon forget it.” —Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces
“Spellbinding…Readers might be tempted to disappear alongside this kaleidoscopic foursome.” —K.L. Walther, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules
“A gorgeous, wistful meditation on the pleasure and pain of adolescent girlhood, friendship, and the magic of summer.” —Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer
Sarah Van Name grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and now lives and works in Durham with her family and dog. She is the author of two previous young adult novels, The Goodbye Summer (2019, a Junior Library Guild pick) and Any Place But Here (2021).
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.
Meet Frank Szatowski, a widowed UPS driver in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He has spent the last three years estranged from his adult daughter Maggie—but as our story opens, Maggie calls home to announce that she’s getting married, and she wants her father to walk her down the aisle.
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