Novelist Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks) examines the perils and pleasures of young womanhood as she walks readers down the spiral into a tragedy that evokes the Amanda Knox case.
Straitlaced Irish university student Tabitha--"Taz," to her friends and family--travels to Grifonia, Italy, to study abroad for a year. She chooses Italy because she speaks Italian and Grifonia because it has a reputation for safety, but the city's history is actually steeped in blood all the way back to its Etruscan days. Taz doesn't know about the innocent girls who have lost their lives in Grifonia over the centuries or the legacy of their brutal ends; her imagination is filled with sun-drenched hills, delicious food and charming local boys.
At first, Taz studies and goes on excursions to historic sites, but soon she runs into Jenny, a classmate from back home. Jenny and her friends Anna and Luka exude beauty, confidence and money, and middle-class Taz is surprised but grateful when they draw her into their clique. The year abroad takes on a different tone as Taz's new friends become her ticket to the most exclusive parties, the finest clothing and lavish dining.
Taz's free-spirited American roommate Claire doesn't trust Jenny. And while Taz soon learns her new friends have ulterior motives, she's just as dubious about sensual, overly familiar Claire. Taz's loyalties are further confused when she and Claire wind up with uncomfortably overlapped love lives.
While Crouch's premise is transparently inspired by the Amanda Knox trials, her plot isn't as ripped from the headlines as readers may initially expect. Though the crime and its fallout are the climax and coda of a journey through drugs, sex, and scandal, Crouch's real focus is the dark side of female friendship. Call it the antithesis of chick lit: Crouch explores the simultaneous love and envy that characterize the so-called frenemy relationship. Jenny may call Taz a friend, but her constant conversational games of wit and malice hint that betrayal hovers in the periphery, and her constant digs at Claire illustrate her unwillingness to share a spotlight with another girl. Taz's supportive best friend, still in the U.K., acts as a foil for oversexed Claire and dangerous Jenny. The reader is left wondering if this friend's presence could have averted the gory ending, or if Taz's overwhelming desire for popularity would still lead her to ruin. By turns tender, cutting and brutal, Abroad captures a fascinating vortex of toxic love. --Jaclyn Fulwood
Shelf Talker: The bloody history of an Italian city foreshadows a college girl's year abroad with a crowd of charismatic, reckless friends.