The Brittanys, Paperback

They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys.

Brittany Rosenberg: drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys.

Brittany Gottlieb: insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere!)

Brittany Tomassi: is from New York.

Brittany Jensen: once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. A brash, bold, unapologetic tomboy. And the greatest person in the whole wide world.

At least as far as the fifth Brittany--our narrator--is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo: with their matching JanSport backpacks, Tiffany chokers, and Victoria's Secret push-up bras, they are unstoppable. And now that they're finally growing up, they're going to do everything: dye their hair, attend no-parent parties, try pot . . . maybe even lose their virginities. 2004 is totally going to be their year!

Except Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family--in the lives of her exhausted mother and beloved, genius older brother--life-changing events may be taking shape. Events that only years later, looking back, she has the perspective to see.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

About author(s):BRITTANY ACKERMAN's debut essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was the winner of Red Hen Press's Nonfiction Award. She has a creative writing MFA from Florida Atlantic University, and has attended the Writing by Writers Methow Valley Workshop and the Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France, as well as a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. The Brittanys is her first novel.