Mia, the adult narrator The Girls from Corona del Mar, and Lorrie Ann are inseparable adolescent buddies in a middle-class Southern California coastal town. Mia's mother drinks, her father has run off to San Francisco, and she aborts a pregnancy at age 15 with Lorrie Ann's help. Considering Lorrie Ann's kindhearted beauty and seemingly solid, close family, Mia decides, "I was the bad one."
But then life gets in the way of friendship, as it so often does. Lorrie Ann becomes pregnant, marries the simple but stable father and has a difficult childbirth that yields a son stricken with cerebral palsy. Mia wins a scholarship to Yale, develops her talent for classical languages and falls in love with a scholar with whom she travels to Istanbul to co-translate cuneiform poetry. The girlfriends halfheartedly maintain contact with occasional Skype calls, but Lorrie Ann's unraveling life is a distant background noise to Mia's happiness--until Lorrie Ann shows up in Istanbul barefoot, emaciated and addicted to heroin.
In this debut novel, Rufi Thorpe dives deep into the tangled, sometimes tenuous bonds of friendship. The Girls from Corona del Mar fearlessly addresses the difficult decisions many women face (regarding abortion, marriage, child-rearing, professional success and physical self-abuse) while recognizing that these are often more about fate than choice. Eventually, Mia accepts that making choices is frequently just doing the best one can with what life delivers. It is a testament to the nuance of Thorpe's fine treatment of her characters and their friendship that we come to the same conclusion. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.