Commencement

Four young women are placed in the same dorm at Smith College in their first year, and it is hard to imagine a less likely group. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, unpacks a bottle of vodka. Bree, strikingly beautiful, is homesick for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah. Sally is preppy, fiercely tidy and still raw from the death of her mother. April, a radical redheaded feminist in a "Riot: Don't Diet" T-shirt, asks for a room transfer almost at once. J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Maine, follows the four through their college years and into the ones that come after. Their friendship is tested by fights, new loves and the pull of very different ambitions, and it is also what holds them steady as they try to work out who they want to be. These women belong to the first generation raised to believe every door is open to them, and the novel is sharp about how little that tells them about which door to choose. Sullivan writes with a wry sense of humor and a warm eye for her characters' flaws, and gives a lively, honest picture of what young women face today when the options are endless and the answers are not.