My only encounter with dormitory life was a single year as a freshman at a women’s college, but I still remember the cloistered, intimate atmosphere and the intense bonding. I think I’m a natural audience for a book called ALL GIRLS, former teacher Emily Layden’s first novel and a delicious page-turner.

When you’re new at the fiction game, it’s smart to equip yourself with a well-organized time zone. Layden plots her story over a single academic year at Atwater, an elite Connecticut boarding school. Each section represents some tradition or landmark moment (Orientation, Vespers, Prom), and interspersed with the narrative are “documents” (newspaper articles, letters, official emails from the school) that lend a feeling of authenticity to the setting.

Layden really nails the earnest bureaucratic doublespeak of administrative communiqués. She’s also good at building an almost anthropological picture of adolescent female behavior at close quarters: the clothes (“camel sweaters and Barbour jackets and jeans tucked into Hunter boots”; “an army of preppy, slender, perfectly groomed lumberjacks”), the hair (“a perfectly untidy bun”), the bands, the cliques, the bootleg booze, the language (“a tendency…to try on the linguistic costume of an adult woman, yoking together big concepts and tight construction in a distinctive pitch and clip”), the cool and the uncool. It’s fun and colorful and full of well-observed detail.

"...a delicious page-turner.... ALL GIRLS is a juicy, terrific read with a dash of girl power, and I gobbled it up like a bag of SkinnyPop..."

None of this would matter without some plot-driven momentum. Atwater is in crisis because of an accusation by a former student, then 18, that she was raped in 1995 by a male faculty member (still employed there), and that the administration covered it up by expelling her for a minor infraction. In the wake of this news, someone in the school community is perpetrating a series of rule-busting pranks: posting roadside stands near the school that read A RAPIST WORKS HERE; leaking a banned issue of The Daily Heron, the school newspaper, on the subject of sexual assault; blanketing the campus with art by the alleged rapist --- all meant to pressure Atwater into firing the man in question and highlighting the need for a more enlightened policy. The addition of a whodunit element ratchets up the suspense as the girls speculate on the culprit’s identity. (Yes, you do find out at the end. No, I’m not going to tell.)

While the school struggles to contain the scandal, the girls --- nine different narrators in all --- struggle to understand consent and sexuality in their own terms. The students are very sweet, “relatable” characters, each of them feeling, as adolescents almost universally do, that they are vulnerable outsiders. I was particularly touched by Chloe, a shy junior whose sense that she has fallen behind her classmates (“Everybody else was having versions of sex now, or at least talking about it”) leads her down a dangerous path to an incident that will resonate for the rest of her life.

Although prep schools are tradition-bound places that seem outside of time in some respects (absolutely nothing but bridal white dresses for graduation), in ALL GIRLS Layden has updated the coming-of-age genre for the 21st century. Gay relationships are pretty much accepted, although the model lesbian couple on campus has problems of their own. The kids make cynical remarks about a specific ethnic identity being a pass to a good college but are also aware of unconscious racial bias. An Asian American girl gets excessive credit for her straight black hair, while a mixed-race senior from California is praised for her “exotic,” “interesting” looks and is asked where she’s from. Although #MeToo won’t go viral for another couple of years (the book is set in 2015), the rape accusation suggests that an institutional whitewash of sexual wrongdoing has been going on at Atwater for decades (the ripped piece of preppy tartan on the cover signals how the school’s ideals have been tarnished).

Voice, I think, is where Layden’s inexperience shows. The multiple points of view, while entertaining, feel as if she is skimming the surface rather than digging into any one character. It’s hard to get invested. This reader had trouble keeping track of all nine, especially when many have those unisex names (Addison, Blake, Sloane, Collier). The narrators sound too much the same, and they tend to become representative “types”: math/science nerd on the autism spectrum, failed ballerina, mixed-race lesbian, Asian American with restaurant in family, wealthy scion of three generations of Atwater girls.

Teenagers are always kind of divided: trying to be chill on the outside, while anguished and anxious within. Layden is well aware of this, but I think she’s most successful when her tone is dryer, wittier, more distanced. She tends to get sentimental and/or soapboxy when trying to tap into nascent feminist convictions, as when one student observes that the culture “takes and takes and takes from girls, all the while refusing to recognize them as whole people.” Laudable sentiments, for sure, but so earnest. Especially toward the end, Layden seemed to be jamming her material into a sleek, uncontroversial package. It easily could be turned into a teen show on The CW.

And what’s wrong with that? Nothing. There’s a place for books that are deep and transformative and for those with a lighter touch. ALL GIRLS is a juicy, terrific read with a dash of girl power, and I gobbled it up like a bag of SkinnyPop (Layden is big on brand names). It took me straight back to that time in high school when we were all trying to figure out what the hell it meant to be a woman, and other girls were our mirrors, rivals, co-conspirators and guides.