One summer, the narrator of “Husbands” arrives at an all-girls camp in Maine, her body gangling and conspicuously mature, yet she still carries a “little layer of baby fat which unfortunately had not melted away in the fires of puberty.” Thus, Emma, like all her thirteenand fourteen-year-old bunkmates, stands on the perilous threshold between childhood and adolescence. In the fog of that time, they begin to play a seemingly innocent game. “The game didn’t start with the bad stuff, that came later,” the older narrator, now married, tells us. And so begins our sense of dread and foreboding as Emma and the other girls yield to the dictatorial charm of the “alpha girl,” Rachel Fine.
What struck me most about “Husbands” was its powerful sense of immediacy. The feeling that the story’s voice, sensibility, and reality were all leaping off the page. Forcefully. Palpably. With humour, intelligence, and daring, the author plumbs the mysteries and terrors of female adolescence, replete with confusion and subterranean feelings. I have two adolescent daughters, and this story reminded me that the metamorphoses they are undergoing can be painful, baffling, and cruel — but also tender, surprising, and miraculous.
