When Ruby orders Chloe to swim across the reservoir and back at night, and to dive down at the center to grab a souvenir from Olive, the town underwater, Chloe does it. Everything else is like our world, but Ruby exerts a pull that is truly out of this world.

Whatever Ruby wants, Ruby gets no one can deny her anything, so long as they remain in their little town. All the boys want her, all the girls want to be her, and she will never love anyone as much as she loves Chloe. Ruby is a sun, and everyone within the pull of her personality moves according to her whims. She lives in the orbit of her older sister, Ruby, like everyone else in their town. Imaginary Girls walks the line between realistic fiction, magical realism and flat-out paranormal in such a way that I'm still not sure precisely how I should categorize it.Ĭhloe, the narrator, is hardly the heroine of her own story. Suma plumbs these depths, leaving the reader questioning what is real and what is insanity. Underneath those waters, though, is another story, a whole town of issues, buried beneath the waters. On the surface, Imaginary Girls is a contemporary mystery, the story of two sisters, relatively calm and placid, like the surface of a reservoir. Suma's debut is a gloriously dark magical realism mindfuck of a novel that kept me curious through every page. Imaginary Girls wasn't what I expected, but it was so much better than that. With any new author so beloved in the blogosphere, there's the fear that the books won't live up to the hype. Nova Ren Suma has been on my absolutely-must-read list since her debut, but I've only just gotten around to reading one of her books.

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma