Atomic Hearts

Gertie is sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, carrying a secret heavy enough to threaten her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been inseparable since birth, held together partly by the fact that both of their fathers are addicts. Life at home is unsteady for each of them, and it feels a little easier when they are together on a trampoline, passing around stolen vodka and talking about moving to New York. Then a bonfire and an aerosol canister combine in an accident that lands Gertie in the hospital. With nowhere else to go, she is sent to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her father, who is newly sober. It looks like a way out of the trouble she left behind, but trouble follows. There are parties with no curfews, boys with no boundaries, a compromising photo, and a tragedy back home. Meanwhile her father is once again close to falling apart. Afraid of what honesty with Cindy might cost her, Gertie retreats into the fantasy novel she is writing, a story about a girl making her way through a strange land on nothing but her wits. Years later, old ghosts resurface, and Gertie, now settled into a steadier adult life, sits down to write about that summer again. Drawing on the imagination that carried her through as a teenager, she allows herself to tell the story the way she always hoped it might have gone. Megan Cummins's debut novel mixes a teenage summer romance with a family tragedy, and builds toward its revelations with the tension of a ticking clock. It is a story about friendship, addiction, and the odd work of parenting your own parents, and about how love and imagination can pull a person through.