These Bodies Between Us

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A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

“A lusciously crafted and achingly poignant story about girlhood with a haunting twist that readers will savor. You won’t soon forget it.”—Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces

“Spellbinding… Readers might be tempted to disappear alongside this kaleidoscopic foursome.”—K.L. Walther, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules

“A gorgeous, wistful meditation on the pleasure and pain of adolescent girlhood, friendship, and the magic of summer.”—Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer

“An absolutely stunning exploration of the invisibility and heartbreak of being a teenage girl. I literally couldn’t put it down.”—Nita Tyndall, author of Who I Was with Her

“An original and worthwhile journey…a suspenseful story of friendship and magic.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Eloquent, sometimes heartbreaking character study…luminous language.”—Publishers Weekly

“[T]his evocative summer novel has precisely the right blend of haunting fantastical elements and down-to-earth realism as Van Name explores body dysmorphia, male-gaze culture, queerness in the South, and the unbreakable bond of teenage friendships.” —Booklist

A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.

Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.

This summer, they’re going to disappear.

For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.

Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.

Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves… and do they even want to?