“Can you say ‘mother-daughter literary catastrophe’? That’s what our book club was.”

Adrienne Haus is the survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of them didn’t want to join; her mother signed her up because she was stuck at home all summer, with her knee in a brace. CeeCee’s parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of “The Unbearable Book Club”—CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and Adrienne—were all going into eleventh-grade A.P. English. But they weren’t friends. They were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, open this book and read her essay, which she’ll turn in when she goes back to school. . . .

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Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Minnesota Book Award. Her other books include a short story collection, An Explanation for Chaos, and five books for younger readers: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (available May 8), Black Box, The Book of One Hundred Truths, The Chain Letter, and Grass Angel. Julie Schumacher lives in St. Paul and is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.