These Girls

Pekkanen's third novel (after The Opposite of Me and Skipping a Beat) offers an engrossing look into the lives of three young women, each struggling with a personal crisis. Renee, a magazine staffer looking to score a new position at a beauty magazine, is forced into a competitive situation with other hopefuls while wrestling with her own body issues. Cate is adjusting to her promotion to features editor as she tries to cope with the authority issues raised by a staff she's new to supervising. And Abby is a graduate student, fleeing a nanny position and a different town. The three stories are woven together well, and while each of these women is carrying a secret, Renee's and Cate's secrets are told to the reader in the beginning of their narratives, while Abby's is revealed, quite satisfactorily, in a series of flashbacks.