What Girls Learn: A novel

What Girls Learn tells the story of two sisters: Tilden, our watchful, wise-child narrator, and her rebellious and risk-taking younger sister, Elizabeth. With a combination of shared secrets and bitter rivalry, they seek to find out more about their mysterious mother, Frances. Part rule-maker, part hopeless romantic, Frances falls for a man her daughters have never met, and moves them from a hardscrabble life in Atlanta to a more permanent home up North. Life with Nick seems to offer a new kind of stability, but soon they encounter a far more treacherous challenge. For just as the girls explode into adolescence, coming into their bodies with rage, awkwardness, and eroticism, Frances discovers a lump in her breast, and a world of doctors and diagnoses, hope and despair, unfolds. In What Girls Learn, Karin Cook challenges traditional notions of family and femininity with both humor and wisdom. Cook reminds us that what seems secure is never entirely safe, and that growing up means learning to love even in the face of loss.