"The Bitch Posse is dark, poignant, and only too believable. Renny, Cherry, and Amy are strivers at school by day and connivers by night. Self-styled rebels without a clue, they are bound together in friendship. Little do they realize that there will come a day when their naive passions will lead them to a vicious mishap, blood that will stay on their hands for the rest of their lives. This is a book that will walk alongside you, and haunt your dreams, long after you turn the last page."---Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean and A Theory of Relativity

"The fierce young heroines of Martha O'Connor's uncompromising novel team up in high school and head out into the night to raise hell---not knowing, of course, the infernal depths to which their anger and pain can take them. From the first the story of Rennie, Cherry, and Amy is eye-popping: a profane and unabashed account of a girls' pact to get out of the Midwest and get even with the small-town toss of the dice that's doomed them. Told in dramatic flash-like chapters, skimming back and forth through time, and allowing raw emotion to be its nerve-addled guide, The Bitch Posse is a debut worthy of Joyce Carol Oates. That is, O'Connor steals into Oates's bleak, erotically desolate territory by night to explore the pathology of adolescent loneliness and longing, along the way making full-fledged women of this compellingly capricious sister act. And in the end, it's lit---just so---by the glow of the dying fires of youth, and bitter with the taste of the aftermath ashes of a hard-won yet oddly hopeful wisdom."---Edmund White, author of Fanny: A Fiction

"This is a novel that gets under the skin, a novel that cuts deep. Martha O'Connor has crafted a trio of unforgettable characters, young women so heart-wrenchingly alive, they burst from the page. The Bitch Posse has all the makings of a modern-day classic; it left me shaken, moved, and deeply grateful for the journey."---Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds and winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction

"A nuanced and often disturbing consideration of the assets and liabilities of friendship and loyalty. Very brave mother-daughter book groups will do well to choose this novel!" -Katharine Weber, author of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, The Music Lesson, and The Little Women

"Every once in a while a book comes along that speaks the truth so intensely that it's a bit like ambulance chasing: You want to look away but simply can't. In this era of Prada-obsessed chick-lit heroines and Machiavellian Mean Girls, the young women in The Bitch Posse are complex Every Girls---precocious but confused, wry but sad, rebellious but stability-seeking, insecure yet powerful. An exquisitely observant portrait of three very different best friends whose lives change forever on a fateful night in high school, The Bitch Posse is one of the saddest, funniest, and most original stories about deep emotional connections and the forces that threaten to unravel them."---Lori Gottlieb, author of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self