OTHER GIRLS BY DIANE AYRES (KENSINGTON, MAY 2002, ISBN: 0758201117) What really goes on behind the ivy-covered walls of a women's college? Welcome to the complicated life of Elizabeth Breedlove, a frosh at Willard College for Women. Her world is suddenly filled with lesbian vampires, lovesick professors, swashbuckling fencers, premature ejaculators, incarcerated therapists, supermodels, rapists, feminists, existentialists and, at long last, lovers. With OTHER GIRLS, debut novelist DIANE AYRES transports readers to a picturesque, cigarette-smoke-hazy academia where an unlikely love triangle -- or is it a quadrangle? -- is about to turn life at one of America's most elite women's colleges upside down.

Weaving a tangled, colorful web of young and intense emotion, Ayres tells a seductive story about the pain of love and the burdens of growing up that evokes Donna Tartt's A Secret History, the academic romps of Robertson Davies and David Lodge, and even the work of J.D. Salinger. Smart, engrossing, hilariously literate and frighteningly accurate, OTHER GIRLS is set in the exclusive -- and currently endangered -- world of women's colleges. But its timeless narrative and startlingly human characters make it an equal opportunity page-turner about coming of age. Or, in the words of one early reviewer from OUT Magazine, "This debut novel from Diane Ayres is a frothy good time, packed with sex, seduction, betrayal, revenge, and a healthy addiction to midnight poker. We've heard this girls' school high jinks tale before, but it's rarely been this much good plain fun."