A Gorgeous Excitement A Novel

A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman's summer of infinite possibility--and looming danger. It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum--half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed. Freud called a cocaine high 'a gorgeous excitement' and, as Nina Jacobs is about to learn, New York is a deadly place to be gorgeous. Set against the backdrop of a menacingly gritty Manhattan of the 1980s, Cynthia Weiner's debut is a timeless and universal story of a young woman trying to find her voice, and of the countless young women whose voices were silenced. There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother's depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible--when her mother isn't lying in bed for days, she's lashing out at Nina over