Selected by The Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2000.

Aimee Bender's stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise.

Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.

"Witty and engaging....[A] fanciful and original take on the quietly helter-skelter world that lies within." The New York Times

"This novel is light as a zephyr and unique as a snowflake." The Washington Post

"[Bender] has taken an achingly idiosyncratic story and rendered it with eloquence, hilarity, and ominous precision....Beguiling and chilling at once." The Boston Globe

"A breezy, electric smash of a first novel." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Aimee Bender is one writer who is shouting clearly and beautifully from the hilltops that our lives are most definitely not ordinary and typical." The Denver Post

"Delicately surreal....[An Invisible Sign of My Own] reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale overlaid with the futuristic alienation of Philip K. Dick." Entertainment Weekly

"Reading Aimee Bender's feverish, Loony Farms fiction, you can practically see her frantic fingers working over each sentence. At her best, Bender makes you root for her to keep furiously pressing down on the keyboard; you hope she'll make things so crazy that you'll turn the page and find all the words capitalized, or garbled, or bursting into fire. But Bender's prose, always beautiful, always original, stays contained in its typeface, where it might be even scarier.

"In her first book, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Bender created a world made of emotional spurts. The stories in that collection were full of mermaids, imps, and strange allegories that blurred into the mundane, contemporary lives of women sitting at desks, getting engaged, living in shadowy, lonely apartments. Bender's women live out their warped thoughts — they fly, they spit, they shred their dresses. They always dream violently and have dangerous quirks; they're barely civil and ready to burst. One of Bender's characters would tear off the head of a shoe-obsessed Sex and the City chick in two seconds flat.

"Bender once again creates a woman passionately on the brink in An Invisible Sign of My Own, her first novel. This time it's Mona Gray, an obsessive-compulsive who knocks on wood until her knuckles are raw and bleeding, sleeps with the light on, washes her mouth out with soap whenever she feels sexual desire, and takes an ax home for her 20th birthday, contemplating cutting off body parts in an attempt to mentally stave off her father's impending death from a mysterious illness. Death, to Mona, is the ultimate loss of control: 'A sharp, dark sliver; a loose, pale pellet. On the day of your death, it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead.'

"Mona calms herself with numbers and geometry, with which she feels a visceral connection. She counts out everything, feels 'practically married' to the octagons that form stop signs, and sees traffic cones as 'vivid and isosceles.' Mona becomes a math teacher, excelling in the classroom, especially with her rambunctious and restless second-grade class, where she has the ultimate challenge of taming chaotic 7-year-olds with math. She succeeds by having them create numbers out of material — sticks, I.V. tubes — and what at first seems eminently manageable turns unstable as Mona involves herself in her students' lives. Her math lessons become emotional explorations, and her associations with numbers begin to shudder with despondency, so that a 50 becomes a feeling of doom; a 42, panicky elation.

"She meets Benjamin Smith, the handsome science teacher with chemical burns on his arms. They date and make out, but like death, sex for Mona is a poetry too formless and uncontained to face. She describes sleeping with her first boyfriend as poisonously awesome: 'His skin was a buoyant ship over mine, and he kissed threads of silver into the back of my neck.' Afraid she will explode into meaninglessness again, she barely gets that far with Benjamin before having to run into the bathroom and scrub out her mouth with soap.

"At times, the plot of An Invisible Sign of My Own seems too imposing to allow Bender's unwound, poetically wandering prose to flower. As Mona moves from the violent, scratchy internal world of her home to her responsible classroom persona, she flips too quickly from crazy to controlled, and we lose our grounding occasionally. In one scene, her lovable class turns violent, and Mona seems strangely frozen, waiting for a Benderian opportunity to scoot out of the plot and do something wholly unpredictable.

"The novel works best when Bender shakes free of the need to assign everything nicely into chapters, instead devoting pages to depicting Mona as she worries about death, stares at the slanted parallelograms of her alarm clock's digital display, or, at the very end, creates a heartbreaking fairy tale to comfort one of her students. In these moments, her writing becomes translucent, reminding us that she's the rare writer who, no matter how far beyond plausible a situation is, reveals her own pain and heart in describing it. In An Invisible Sign of My Own, Bender's main character must hold all that warped twitchery within the structured confines of a novel — a difficult task that Bender accomplishes nicely, though you wish, in a way, she didn't feel she had to." Mike Albo, Salon.com

"With its sparse, ironic prose, this novel is a wonderful literary treatment of anxiety, depression, and compulsion. Readers of Bender's collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, will not be disappointed, as well as those looking for a fresh, groundbreaking author." Michelle Kaske, Booklist

"Bender's gifts go beyond a wicked sense of humor. Stylistically, her prose is spare and evocative. She is masterful at depicting the awkwardness of male-female romance." Carmen Scheidel, Time Out New York

Mona Gray, a second grade math teacher, knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. But while she maintains this precarious equilibrium in her strange, tidy universe, love intrudes in the form of the new science teacher.

Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harper's, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.