‘You never told me about that, ’ Mom said, ‘but I think a lot of things happened at Mollie’s I didn’t know about…’ and she smiled. Kate thought about the skinny-dipping, but also finding Uncle RJ’s magazines, and kissing Mollie’s brother–the one who got married tonight.

Girls at home, with their sometimes cruel and sometimes protective families, girls in other girls’ homes, seeing everything. Girls watching boys, girls in the woods, girls in fairy tales, and girls handled roughly, like disposable kittens in a sack for drowning. C. Kubasta imagines all the girls through the lens of two friends hurtling toward womanhood, as they crash into and orbit around men and each other–trying to snatch from life their own terrifying hopes and desires. Girling takes the reader into the magic and secret space that exists in the whispers between two girls, equally best friends and rivals. In direct, engaging prose, Kubasta locates the girl who women forget and men erase in a coming-of-age story that peels away the distortion and hazy memories that protect women from understanding their own power and hubris. This is an engaging fiction debut that exposes the heart and blood of small town BFFs as an unexpectedly sophisticated, fast-paced girlhood rife with fragile innocence, visceral experiences, and self-awareness.