BRITTANY ACKERMAN's debut essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was the winner of Red Hen Press's Nonfiction Award. She has a creative writing MFA from Florida Atlantic University, and has attended the Writing by Writers Methow Valley Workshop and the Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France, as well as a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. The Brittanys is her first novel.
“I’ve never read any book that captures so perfectly all the sweet
and bitter and mess and tenderness and hard lessons in being
fourteen. Nor the highly specific, totally unfakeable feeling of
the year 2004. Brittany Ackerman must have kept the most detailed
diary. Her voice in The Brittanys, naive yet seeing all, looking
both forward and backward, always figuring and looking for wisdom.
I found every page of this book to be the perfect mix of
entertaining, satisfying, questioning, and moving. It glows with
Ackerman’s love for her characters. I could have stayed inside it
forever.”
—Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
“A richly nostalgic portrait. . . . It is the poignant female
relationships—between best friends and mothers and daughters—that
reveal the story’s true soul. . . . Ackerman locates an
achingly realistic but unsentimentally clear-eyed portrait of the
youthful relationships that end but are never truly over. A
raw, funny and bittersweet novel about the awkward tenderness of
adolescence.”
—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“A bittersweet, funny, and totally nostalgic foray into the minds
of teenage girls and their secrets, betrayals, and dreams. . .
. Ackerman nails it all. If you have ever been a teenage girl,
you will instantly find yourself quaking in your imaginary Nikes,
your fictional wrong-color JanSport weighing you down like an
anvil. . . . If you’ve run out of episodes of Pen15 or can’t
stand another binge-watch of Gossip Girl, this is a perfect palate
cleanser.”
—Rebecca Munro, Bookreporter
“The Brittanys will take you right back to life in the early 2000s
with Tiffany necklaces and Victoria's Secret everything. Can you
say nostalgia?!”
—Elizabeth Ann Entenman, HelloGiggles, “The 10 Best New Books
to Add to Your June Reading List”
“Some of my fondest summer memories are of hanging out aimlessly in
my high school BFF’s basement and ‘discussing plans for the
rest of our lives,’ as the narrator of The Brittanys puts
it—which is probably why I found this
year-in-the-mind-of-a-fourteen-year-old-girl (in 2004, no less) to
hit that summer-reading sweet spot. . . . The relationship between
the narrator Brittany and Brittany Jensen is at the heart of
things, and what a fickle, vulnerable, overflowing heart it
is.”
—Eliza Smith, Literary Hub, “38 Novels You Need to Read This
Summer”
“The cult classic movie Heathers will come to mind. Set in an elite
Florida prep school, the novel portrays what it’s like to be a
teenage girl in a tight-knit group and what happens when one of
them diverges from the flock.”
—Palm Beach Daily News, "2021 Summer Reading List"
“Full of brilliantly-rendered awkwardness and the hilarious minor
horrors of a privileged adolescence, The Brittanys shimmers with
the everyday incandescence of youth—car rides and homework, tampons
and eyeliner, questionable fashion choices. Ackerman writes
convincingly and empathetically about fourteen-year-old girls
caught in that painful, exhilarating span of becoming. For anyone
who has ever dyed their own hair, worn an absurd outfit, had a
crush on someone ridiculous, or said the wrong thing—in other
words, for anyone who was once a teenager—this book is for
you.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
“The Brittanys. Teenage girls who really have everything: youth,
beauty, swimming pools, and private school. And so much pressure. I
read Brittany Ackerman’s page-turning debut novel The Brittanys
with my heart on my sleeve.”
—Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice
“Honest, funny, and totally engrossing, The Brittanys chronicles
the freshman year of one of five Brittanys at a suburban prep
school in the early 2000s. Author Brittany Ackerman’s most
impressive feat is transforming the unspectacular, everyday events
and humiliations of teenagehood into a fascinating and heartfelt
narrative. Somehow, she’s captured that special blend of nostalgia
and cringe that you can otherwise only find by flipping through a
high school yearbook.”
—Maria Adelmann, author of Girls of a Certain Age
“Sharply detailed but hauntingly universal, The Brittanys
encapsulates a moment in time for those who have lived it and
introduces those who haven’t to an entire world underneath the
carefully manicured surface of suburban teenage girlhood. The
details Ackerman chooses to leave out are just as important and
telling as the ones her narrator obsesses over, creating an
achingly solipsistic narrative. Ackerman deftly captures that
exquisite contradiction of female adolescence, the simultaneous
yearning both to stand out and to disappear.”
—Eleanor Kriseman, author of The Blurry Years
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