Abroad
A Novel
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3.8 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Not since Donna Tartt's The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life.
The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students—thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they've come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of parents and others who know them too well. There's a reason Henry James's young ladies went to Europe with chaperones. Today's young ladies don't.
In Abroad, the bestselling novelist Katie Crouch—whose Girls in Trucks brilliantly portrayed the cruelties of postcollege New York life on a Southern girl trying to make her way—tears a story from international headlines and transforms it into a page-turning parable of modern girlhood, full of longing and reckless behavior. As the heroine (and the reader) of Abroad will soon discover, Grifonia is a city filled with dangerous secrets of many kinds: ancient, eternal, infernal. "Prepare to have your heart broken while laughing out loud at this breathtaking, scathingly sardonic novel," wrote People magazine's reviewer about Crouch's Men and Dogs. "From her opening line. . . Crouch grabs you and never lets go." In Abroad, Crouch's mesmerizing talents are again on full display.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mystery based on the Amanda Knox saga unfolds in this strong fifth novel from the author of Girls in Trucks. Tabitha ("Taz") Deacon, an Irish student studying abroad in Grifonia, Italy, finds herself caught up in the glamorous lives of a trio of beautiful, and close, fellow students while also nurturing a friendship with her quirky American flatmate, Claire. As Taz spends more time with the Brit Four Society the nickname bestowed upon her quartet by its leader, Jenny Cole she becomes increasingly aware of tension beneath the surface. Why don't the girls let Taz pay for anything? How do they know people in such positions of power? Why do the other girls seem afraid of Jenny? And at the center of the plot is the beautiful, odd Claire, who will be inextricably bound to Taz's fateful experience. Taz's friendships develop and then unravel against a backdrop of ancient history, in a town that has plenty of its own underlying tension. The similarities to the Amanda Knox story are myriad, and at times distracting, but Crouch explores an overshadowed element of that case: the victim, her thoughts and dreams and mistakes, as well as those she'll never be able to have or make. "We were all alive, and we loved and hated and lived brilliant, messy existences," Taz says.
Customer Reviews
Abroad by Katie Crouch
This book is one that kept my attention on because I paid for it. Very dissatisfied and disappointed. Girls in Trucks is a wonderful book that she wrote. Men and Dogs was simply ok, and Abroad is just....a waste.