About this item
Suspenseful and cinematic, Bittersweet exposes the gothic underbelly of an idyllic world of privilege and an outsider's hunger to belong. On scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college, ordinary Mabel Dagmar is surprised to befriend her roommate, the beautiful, wild, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow. Ev invites Mabel to spend the summer at Bittersweet, her cottage on the Vermont estate where her family has been holding court for more than a century; it's the kind of place where children twirl sparklers across the lawn during cocktail hour. Mabel falls in love with midnight skinny-dipping, the wet dog smell that lingers near the yachts, and the moneyed laughter that carries across the still lake while fireworks burst overhead. Before she knows it, she has everything she's ever wanted: friendship, a boyfriend, access to wealth, and, most of all, for the first time in her life, the sense that she belongs. But as Mabel becomes an insider, a terrible discovery leads to shocking violence and reveals what the Winslows may have done to keep their power intact - and what they might do to anyone who threatens them. Mabel must choose: either expose the ugliness surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or keep the family's dark secrets and make Ev's world her own.
About the Author
I write novels. My fifth, Fierce Little Thing, a literary psychological thriller, is about a group of five friends raised on a commune-turned-cult in rural Maine, and the terrible thing they do in a last ditch effort to try to save it. Twenty-plus years later, they're scattered to the wind, but someone blackmails them back to the land, where they have to decide how far they'll go to silence them. I've heard the book described as The Girls meets The Interestings, with a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer thrown in-- and I'll take it!My New York Times bestseller Bittersweet, my play on a modern gothic thriller, is about an outsider who is invited to her idea of paradise-- a lakeside retreat in rural Vermont. But when she digs deeper into her host family's storied past, she discovers some dark secrets, risking her own life. I wrote Bittersweet for people like me, who love The Secret History and The Emperor's Children; it's a literary beach read.My fourth novel, June, is about what happens when Hollywood came to a small town in Ohio in the fifties-- and the legacy of that summer on those character's descendants fifty years later.