The Book of Goose

Two adolescent girls, Agnes and Fabienne, share an unusual friendship in a rural French village in the years following World War II. Spurred on by family trauma and Fabienne’s dark imagination, the girls, with the assistance of a widowed postmaster, write a book of morbid tales. For reasons she doesn’t explain, Fabienne wants Agnes to be the “face” of the book, which they manage to publish. Agnes briefly becomes a sensation, is declared a prodigy, and is whisked away to a British boarding school led by Mrs. Townsend, who has motives of her own. Thematically, Li’s novel shares similarities with Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Novels,” depicting an intense friendship between intelligent, impoverished girls and what happens when one has opportunities to broaden her scope. However, this latest from MacArthur fellow Li (Must I Go) is more tightly focused, and the nature of the relationship between the two girls differs in some striking ways from Ferrante’s work.