Girl, Unframed, Deb Caletti
Girl, Unframed, Deb Caletti
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Girl, Unframed

Author: Deb Caletti

Narrator: Alex Allwine

Unabridged: 8 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/23/2020


Synopsis

Seven starred reviews!
“A riveting, meticulously plotted mystery with plenty of drama.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A teen girl’s summer with her famous mother turns sinister in this gripping thriller inspired by a real-life Hollywood murder from Printz Honor–winning and National Book Award finalist author Deb Caletti—perfect for fans of Courtney Summers’s Sadie.

Sydney Reilly has a bad feeling about going home to San Francisco before she even gets on the plane. How could she not? Her mother is Lila Shore—the Lila Shore—a film star who prizes her beauty and male attention above all else…certainly above her daughter.

But Sydney’s worries multiply when she discovers that Lila is involved with the dangerous Jake, an art dealer with shady connections. Jake loves all beautiful objects, and Sydney can feel his eyes on her whenever he’s around. And he’s not the only one. Sydney is starting to attract attention—good and bad—wherever she goes: from sweet, handsome Nicco Ricci, from the unsettling construction worker next door, and even from Lila. Behaviors that once seemed like misunderstandings begin to feel like threats as the summer grows longer and hotter.

But real danger, crimes of passion, the kind of stuff where someone gets killed—it only mostly happens in the movies, Sydney is sure. Until the night something life-changing happens on the stairs that lead to the beach. A thrilling night that goes suddenly very wrong. When loyalties are called into question. And when Sydney learns a terrible truth: beautiful objects can break.

About Deb Caletti

Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of over sixteen books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award; A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Girl, Unframed; and One Great Lie. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Chelsea

Fuck, y'all. This one really hurt. It is a book about the millions of ways that men treat women of all ages like objects. It is also a book about a girl who's mother prioritizes her own beauty and the opinion of men over her own daughter and.. this book hit me hard. It hit me SO personally in ways t......more

It’s no surprise that I liked this, because I trust Deb Caletti implicitly at this point, but this really was unique and wonderful and much-needed. The synopsis pitches this as a YA thriller, but more than anything else, it’s a gut punch of a YA coming-of-age story about what it’s like to grow up as......more

This is such a hard book to review because there were just so many elements to it. So many surprises and so many hard, uncomfortable things about it. Sometimes being thrown out of your comfort zone isn't a bad thing. It helps us grow, think of things in a new light and can even make us exam things a......more

Goodreads review by Nev

Girl, Unframed is partly a YA thriller, you spend the whole book knowing that something terrible has happened and are waiting to figure out the specifics. There’s a dark, ominous feeling that permeates the whole story. However, much more of the book is about a teenage girl growing up and having to d......more

GIRL, UNFRAMED started off strong, with narrator Sydney experiencing subtle and not-so-subtle sexism from boys, men and her actress mom’s internalized misogyny. Slow, repetitive pacing had me waiting for *something* to happen. We know from the blurb a crime is committed. I didn’t expect to wait unti......more


Quotes

"Narrator Alexandra Allwine maximizes the tension in this YA page-turner. Sydney Reilly is planning to spend her sixteenth summer in a mansion in San Francisco with Lila Shore, her movie-star mother. But her heavenly summer soon turns to hell, and Allwine's depiction makes that clear as Lila's tones range from helplessness to fury, with notes of egotism beneath both. Allwine presents Syd's boyfriend, Jake, with disturbing tones of coarseness and bullying. Allwine emphasizes Syd's strong internal voice, her powers of wonder, her intellect, her struggles with sexual awakening, and her determination to become 'full in the world, and in my body and in my own self.' Each chapter begins with a courtroom exhibit that adds to the driving plot."