"Dazzling. . . . A piercing joy."-Newsday

In 1966, longing to escape Levittown and her self-absorbed artist father, fourteen-year-old Maude secures a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. As family tensions surface, she struggles to find a morally acceptable place in the worlds of high art and social privilege.

Anna Shapiro is the author of two previous novels, The Right Bitch and Life and Love, Such as They Are, and a collection of essays, A Feast of Words.

"[Shapiro] writes with a comic flair and a specificity that leave you a little turned on and smiling in recognition-but what gives you a chill is that she writes the same way about tragedy."-The New Yorker

"Shapiro's writing is fast, funny, and fluent."-The Village Voice

In 1966 Long Island, 14-year-old Maude Pugh is not the typical Levittown girl. Artistic and intellectual, she's always felt like an outsider in her town. Even worse, her father, an abstract artist, has painted the inside of their house black to better showcase his paintings. Maude feels like she's living in an abstract painting, with no space for human figures. When she secures a scholarship to the prestigious Bay Farm School, she hopes that there she'll find the place where she feels truly at home.

She soon befriends Weesie Herrick, a girl who lives on a nearby estate. Maude longs to inhabit Weesie's world, while Weesie envies the Pughs' bohemian lifestyle. Meanwhile, Maude is falling in love with Bay Farm. But just as she comes to feel fully at home there, family tensions and secrets threaten her foothold on happiness.

Shapiro perfectly captures the emotional world of adolescence in this beautifully-written novel about a young girl's struggle to find her own path to happiness, with little support from her increasingly self-absorbed parents. Along the way she provides a vivid peek into Manhattan's avant-garde art circles and the world of the old elite amid the cultural changes of the 1960s.