My Tiki Girl (review)

Tenth-grader Maggie divides her life into BTA, before the accident, and ATA, after the accident; the accident in question was a car crash that killed her mother and left Maggie limping and cane-dependent. Depressed and guilty (she's convinced she's to blame for her mother's death), she's thrilled with the attention of glamorous and eccentric Dahlia, who sucks Maggie into her world of retro fascination (Dahlia's a big fan of Jim Morrison) and her fringy, lawless family (Dahlia's mother moves between charming spontaneity and clinically problematic mood swings). As Dahlia forms a band and captivates the male portion of Maggie's old social circle, Maggie begins to realize that her devotion to Dahlia has gone beyond the friendly and into the romantic. Maggie's narrative voice is compelling, dreamy and intense in a way that recalls Angela Chase's voiceovers for My So-Called Life (and Dahlia is clearly Maggie's Rayanne Graff ), and the book is poignant in depicting the contrast between her self-image as "Frankenstein girl" and the heated, fantasy-tinged intimacy she experiences in her affair with Dahlia. It's utterly believable that she's engaging in romanticization as well as romance, and McMahon counters this nicely by allowing Dahlia to be fully human, capable of buckling under social pressure and being frustrated by Maggie's starry-eyed views as well as getting caught up in the magic herself. The period would seem to be the 1980s, so social pressures are even greater than they would be contemporarily, but third millennium readers will have no trouble recognizing the combination of disaster and glory that so often marks first love.