Publisher: Random House USA Inc
Category: Contemporary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Book Format: Paperback
In 1968, a clerical mistake threatens the prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the small New England town of Cape Wilde. After a century of all-male, old-boy education, the school accidentally admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, outspoken, fifteen-year-old black girl whose arrival will have both an immediate and long-term effect on the prep school and everyone in its orbit. There's the school's philandering headmaster, Goddard God Byrd, who had promised co-education over his dead body and who finds his syllabi full of dead white males and patriarchal tradition constantly challenged; there's EV, the daughter of God's widowed mistress who watches Carole's actions as she grows older with wide eyes and admiration; and, finally, there's Carole herself, who bears the singular challenge of being the First Girl in a world that's not quite ready to embrace her.
Carolyn Cooke's short-story collection, The Bostons, was a winner of the 2002 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and in two volumes each of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, she teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
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