Pages for You

“[A] modern version of the age-old story of first love and sexual initiation. . . . bathed in a joyful, cloistered mood of sensual celebration.” —Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review

In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. Flannery, a seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her—college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life—is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it takes her.

When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class taught by the remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject—Baudelaire, lipstick colors—Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.

A bittersweet, exhilarating, sentimental education, Pages for You confirms Sylvia Brownrigg as "one of the most exuberantly agile minds among younger American writers" (Dan Cryer, Newsday).

“Page by page, Brownrigg captures in delicious and witty prose the rapture and humiliation of first love: first sight, first words, first flirtation, first gift, first kiss, first night, first declaration, first fight and, as the prologue gives away, first betrayal.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hauntingly beautiful.” —Booklist

“This elegantly rendered, poignant novel is ultimately about awakenings both bright and rude, the intoxicating nature of desire, and the realization that love can devastate just as easily as it exalts.” —The Village Voice