Rainey Royal

THE ACCLAIMED NOVEL OF GIRLHOOD, FRIENDSHIP, AND SEXUALITY SET IN THE BOHEMIAN GREENWICH VILLAGE OF 1970s NEW YORK

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives in a once-elegant, now-crumbling townhouse with her cultish jazz-pianist father and the women who orbit him. Her mother is gone. Her father’s best friend hovers too close. And Rainey, left largely to her own devices, must learn to navigate desire, betrayal, and vulnerability in a city that shimmers with promise and threat. As she gathers friends and misfits into her orbit, Rainey tests the limits of who she can become—sometimes a rebel, sometimes a criminal, always a girl determined to recreate herself as both an artist and a young woman in a fractured world.

Each book in the Rainey Royal cycle stands on its own. Together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.

“Rainey is achingly vulnerable and cruelly intimidating … that in-your-face mix of fear and fearlessness, carnality, control and powerlessness that is what it sometimes takes to survive as a female in America.”—The New York Times Book Review