A mother and her teenage daughter grapple with sex, femininity and the lingering effects of trauma in Jane Healey’s thoughtful, seductive new novel, THE OPHELIA GIRLS.

Moody teenager Maeve and her family have decamped from London to the countryside, where they’ve taken up residence in a crumbling old house owned by her late grandfather. The move is meant to be a reset. Maeve is finally in remission after a grueling ordeal with cancer that nearly killed her. Living in the sprawling home, surrounded by nature, will give everyone --- Maeve; her parents, Ruth and Alex; and the six-year-old twins, Iza and Michael --- a chance to decompress and finally breathe again. But a change of scenery can’t solve the family’s underlying issues, which bubble to the surface over the course of one hot, languid summer.

Maeve is struggling to adjust to a life that’s not defined by illness, where she’s “an ordinary 17-year-old girl, not a sickly creature bound to bed.” Having spent much of her childhood in the hospital, she’s arrived at young adulthood naive and inexperienced in many ways. But she’s no less eager (and perhaps more so) than any teenager to make choices that aren’t dictated by her parents’ wishes.

"Healey’s second book is a compelling meditation on what it means to be a girl, and a woman, in a world that often wants to define that in a narrow way."

For Ruth, the return to her childhood home is fraught with painful memories, particularly of her last summer there, which was marked by a tragedy that goes unexplained until late in the book. Back in 1973, Ruth and her friends formed a close-knit clique that outsiders dubbed “the Ophelia girls” for their habit of dressing up like Shakespeare’s doomed character. Their portrayals of Ophelia and other women from literature and mythology are inspired by pre-Raphaelite paintings. They “tak[e] turns to stand on the mossy bank and take photos of each other looking beautiful and tragic,” images that fill them with “a new thrum of power, of possibility.” Now an adult, Ruth --- who is stuck in a marriage where the shared purpose of caring for a sick child is giving way to shared contempt --- is wondering where all that possibility went.

Enter Stuart, Ruth’s childhood friend. Now a celebrated war photographer, he’s spending the summer in a guest house on the family’s property. He immediately takes an interest in Maeve, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother as a teenager. Maeve welcomes the attention. She hopes, with a restless, impatient energy, that he’ll make a move, “want[ing] him to want her, to be a beautiful object in his hands.” But she is unaware of the exact nature of his history with her mother, or how the photos Stuart takes of her replicate those Ruth posed for decades earlier.

Healey skillfully weaves together the past and present in THE OPHELIA GIRLS. We see Maeve experiencing her first rush of sexual power and her efforts to convince herself that Stuart’s inappropriate interest is proof of his love for her. Healey convincingly inhabits the psyche of a teenage girl who believes herself in control of a situation that is more complex than she realizes. She also draws an unsettling portrait of a manipulative older man who slyly insinuates himself into a young w​​oman’s life, all while insisting he’s doing n​​othing wrong. In parallel chapters, Ruth reflects on her current situation and looks back on that formative summer decades earlier, which featured a sexual awakening she has yet to fully reckon with. She also confronts her relationship with her father, from whom she was estranged for many years before his death, and her own complicated feelings about motherhood.

There’s a feverish intensity to THE OPHELIA GIRLS that mirrors the drama of adolescence. It can be a bit much at times, especially a rush of revelations that come toward the end of the novel, which help explain away some characters’ choices in a way that’s not entirely satisfactory. But on the whole, Healey’s second book is a compelling meditation on what it means to be a girl, and a woman, in a world that often wants to define that in a narrow way.