Coming of age in a broken world

Midway through A Gorgeous Excitement, protagonist Nina Jacobs reveals her favorite kind of book: one where the bleak ending is laid out from the start, so you do not have to worry about an unpleasant surprise.

- Srinidhi Ragavendran

A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT By Cynthia Weiner Crown Publishing/Hardcover/ 384 pages/$49.77

At first glance, it seems that Cynthia Weiner employs this very technique in her debut novel, which opens with a stark and straightforward depiction of a murdered girl in Central Park.

"It was the summer of 1986 when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed."

Weiner, drawing from her experience growing up in New York during this time period, sets her story in the cloistered world of Manhattan's Upper East Side, capturing its privilege, excess and insularity.

The novel is inspired by the infamous 1986 "Preppy Murder" case, in which an 18-year-old girl was strangled and her body left in the park.

Yet, A Gorgeous Excitement is anything but a murder mystery. Featuring a protagonist on the brink of adulthood, the narrative is a coming-of-age tale steeped in the slow-burning realization of what it means to grow up as a young woman reckoning with new-found independence and the complex desires that accompany it, from romance to the lure of drugs.