Missing girls, overlooked girls, smart girls, ambitious girls emerge in Catherine Dang's scintillating debut novel, Nice Girls. But none could be called nice girls--certainly not Dang's anti-heroine Mary, a sullen bundle of anger, unbridled temper, insecurities, failure, depression and self-loathing, determined to reinvent herself at college from an overweight, disliked teen. She almost made it, until an act of violence got her expelled from Cornell at the beginning of her senior year.
In high school, the near-friendless Mary concentrated on her grades, making her one of the few from her hometown accepted to an Ivy League college. Education was to be her escape, but now "Ivy League Mary," her nickname in the local newspaper, is back in Liberty Lake, Minn., considered a failure by her disgusted father and herself. Instead of a bright future, she finds mindless work at a grocery store. The day she returns, Mary's childhood friend Olivia Willand, now a social media darling, disappears. Mary's attempts to find out what happened give her purpose. She learns that another young woman's disappearance was ignored by the police because, Mary believes, that 19-year-old was Black.
Dang digs deep to explore Mary's ennui and the anger that prompts her spontaneously to lash out, alienating others. Her inability to trust others and herself causes her to make serious mistakes. Even when the edgy Mary behaves badly--as she often does--Dang keeps readers firmly on her side. Expertly character-driven, Nice Girls shows Dang is a talent to watch. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer