Weightless
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When Carolyn Lessing moves from New Jersey to Alabama with her mother, she rattles the status quo of the juniors at Adams High. Gorgeous, stylish, a great student and gifted athlete without a mean girl bone in her body Carolyn is gobbled up right away by the school's cliques. She even begins dating a senior, Shane, whose on again/off again girlfriend Brooke becomes Carolyn's bitter romantic rival. When a make-out video of Carolyn and Shane makes the rounds, Carolyn goes from golden girl to slut in an instant, with Brooke and her best friend responsible for the campaign.
Carolyn is hounded and focused on, and becomes more and more private. Questions about her family and her habits torture her. But a violent confrontation with Shane and Brooke in the student parking lot is the last attack Carolyn can take.
A novel to drop us all back into the intensity of our high school years, WEIGHTLESS is a startling and assured debut.
Sarah Bannan's deft use of the first person plural gives Weightless an emotional intensity and remarkable power that will send you flying through the pages and leave you reeling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this finely crafted debut, Bannan skillfully delivers a tale of modern-day bullying. When beautiful, sophisticated Carolyn Lessing relocates with her mother to Adamsville, Ala., she's a rare newcomer to the cloistered small town. At first, she's accepted, even admired until the pushed-aside popular high school girls turn vicious and engage in nightmarish torture of Carolyn via social media. The taunts grow progressively more cruel and even progress into physical violence until Carolyn finally breaks, with actions that will reverberate for years to come. Told in the first-person plural (the narrators are never named), this chilling story has a haunting sense of immediacy. "We felt such shame it could be hard to sleep at night," they muse toward the end of the tale. Bannan's provocative novel will stay with readers long after they finish it, and should be an especially effective read for teens.
