Afterparty by Ann Redisch Stampler (review)

Emma’s mother’s fatal overdose casts a long shadow over Emma’s life, turning her father into a super-strict enforcer of rules aimed to keep Emma far away from unacceptable behavior. Rejected by the mean girls in her posh new high school, Emma is lured to the wild side by Siobhan, a fellow outcast who embraces sneaking out, drinking, drugs, and sex as the way to a kind of desperate happiness. Siobhan’s apparent freedom is a powerful attractor for Emma, who fears it’s her resemblance to her troubled mother that causes her her father to hold her reins so tightly. Even when Siobhan starts sleeping with Dylan, the boy she knows Emma likes, Emma can’t help trying to appease Siobhan by following through on the latter’s reckless schemes. By the time Emma realizes that Siobhan is a sociopath, she’s in far too deep, but it’s her love for Siobhan, misguided as it is, that ultimately enables her to chart a path of her own through the self-recrimination of being her mother’s daughter. Emma’s narrative voice is characterized by sophisticated and lyrical self-reflection that deepens and contextualizes the girls-gone-wild plot arc; she’s particularly hard on herself, and the religious subtext of her father’s and her own ambivalent relationship to Judaism hovers over her understanding of a world in much need of repair. Even at her worst, she’s never that bad, enabling readers to stay firmly on her side through her bouts of self-loathing and to empathize with the complexity of her inner struggles.