Media critic Douglas deconstructs the ambiguous messages sent to American women via TV programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reporting over the last 40 years, and fathoms their influence on her own life and the lives of her contemporaries. Photos.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • From the bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and When Life Gives You Lululemons comes a highly entertaining, sharply observed novel about sisters, their perfect lives . . . and their perfect lies. “Goes down like an ice-cold guilty pleasure on a hot beach-reading day.”—USA Today A seat at the anchor desk of the most-watched morning show. Recognized by millions across the country, thanks in part to her flawless blond highlights and Botox-smoothed skin. An adoring husband and a Princeton-bound daughter. Peyton is that woman. She has it all. Until . . . Skye, her sister, is a stay-at-home mom living in a glitzy suburb of New York. She has degrees from all the right schools and can helicopter-parent with the best of them. But Skye is different from the rest. She’s looking for something real and dreams of a life beyond the PTA and pickup. Until . . . Max, Peyton’s bright and quirky seventeen-year-old daughter, is poised to kiss her fancy private school goodbye and head off to pursue her dreams in film. She’s waited her entire life for this opportunity. Until . . . One little lie. That’s all it takes. For the illusions to crack. For resentments to surface. Suddenly the grass doesn’t look so green. And they’re left wondering: will they have what it takes to survive the truth?

This rich history of girls' schools in America takes an illuminating look at the strong convictions of parents and educators that have fueled the wave of all-new girls' schools that have been cropping up across the country.

THE INSTANT BESTSELLER • An indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Esquire, Newsweek, Vogue, Glamour, People, The Huffington Post, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Slate Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence. Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award • Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Emma Cline—One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists Praise for The Girls “Spellbinding . . . a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story.”—The New York Times Book Review “Extraordinary . . . Debut novels like this are rare, indeed.”—The Washington Post “Hypnotic.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gorgeous.”—Los Angeles Times “Savage.”—The Guardian “Astonishing.”—The Boston Globe “Superbly written.”—James Wood, The New Yorker “Intensely consuming.”—Richard Ford “A spectacular achievement.”—Lucy Atkins, The Times “Thrilling.”—Jennifer Egan “Compelling and startling.”—The Economist

Two former best friends return to their college reunion to find that they’re being circled by someone who wants revenge for what they did ten years before—and will stop at nothing to get it—in this “propulsive” (Megan Miranda, bestselling author of The Girl from Widow Hills) psychological thriller. A lot has changed since Ambrosia Wellington graduated from college, and she’s worked hard to create a new life for herself. But then an invitation to her ten-year reunion arrives in the mail, along with an anonymous note that reads, “We need to talk about what we did that night.” It seems Ambrosia’s past—and the people she thoughts she’d left there—aren’t as buried as she believed. Amb can’t stop fixating on what she did or who she did it with: larger-than-life Sloane “Sully” Sullivan, Amb’s former best friend, who could make anyone do anything. At the reunion, Amb and Sully receive increasingly menacing messages, and it becomes clear that they’re being pursued by someone who wants more than just the truth of what happened that first semester. This person wants revenge for what they did and the damage they caused—the extent of which Amb is only now fully understanding. And it was all because of the game they played to get a boy who belonged to someone else and the girl who paid the price. Alternating between the reunion and Amb’s freshman year, The Girls Are All So Nice Here is a “chilling and twisty” (Book Riot) “page-turner” (Entertainment Weekly) about the brutal lengths girls can go to get what they think they’re owed, and what happens when the games we play in college become matters of life and death.

Discusses the physical and emotional changes associated with puberty in boys and suggests ways to ease the adjustment to these changes.