Wendy is a junior at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic high school for girls run by nuns in Chicago. She and her small group of friends are juniors. The girls are all told one morning that the school is going to close at the end of the year. They experience a mixture of relief and shock. Wendy has a lot on her mind and she isn’t sure how this will affect her life. She is an honors student and she is working at a local deli to save for college. She has a love/hate relationship with her friend Kenzie, who is a trouble-maker and a bully but who saved Wendy from social ostracism when she was a freshman. The school closure seems to spur Kenzie to even worse behavior and Wendy knows in her heart that she can’t continue being friends with her. But she risks being completely isolated if she breaks off her friendship with Kenzie — and she also risks whatever revenge that Kenzie would take.

The reason Wendy is so sure that she can’t find new friends is her reputation, or more precisely, her father’s reputation. He used to be a cop, but he was sent to prison for hurting people and misusing his power. She was beaten up once for it, and she feels that she needs Kenzie’s protection. This comes with such a cost though that she starts to realize it isn’t worth it. Before her father’s crimes were uncovered, her best friend was Alexis, but the shame of what her father did made Wendy push Alexis away. Seeing Alexis now reminds Wendy of her former life, and what she used to have, and that’s painful for her.

Wendy’s father sends her cards and wants to contact her, but she wants nothing to do with him. She and her mother have a strained relationship, partly because they hardly ever see each other, because her mother is always working. Paying all the legal costs took all their money, including the money that had been set aside for her college. So Wendy is very isolated and unhappy.  There is a chance of romance with a boy she has met, but she is very tentative about that. She needs some real change in her life for things to come together for her, but any chance is likely to bring pain too.

Neighborhood Girls is a well told story of a young woman coping with family guilt and bullying, working towards forgiveness of her father and standing up for what she believes in. But it is also full of pain, cruelty and fear — it’s a rather dour look at the life of young people. Wendy is charismatic enough as a narrator to pull the reader through and want to keep reading.

© 2018 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.