Maya and Roe, the central characters of Maxine Swann’s 2003 novel Serious Girls meet at boarding school their junior year. Maya’s grandmother had insisted she attend the school, partly to get her away from her hippie mother, insisting that Maya would be “stunted[…]living out there in the boondocks.”

Maya feels like an outsider until she meets Roe, who comes from a nothing town in Georgia. The two girls find that they have a lot in common, a love for thrifting and literature and a desire to figure out who they are and who they might become. Roe asks “if the whole aim in life is to become as distinctly yourself as you can?”

The two girls begin a year long-long journey to figure themselves and their world out and it’s a strange journey, indeed. What Roe wants is “to feel alive, the whole way through.”

As you might expect, part of this journey has to do with boys. For Maya, who is our first person narrator, it’s Arthur, a young man she sees at a diner on a trip into New York City. For Roe, it’s Jesse, who lives in the town where they go to school. There is also drinking and smoking, which feels like a costume the girls put on in order to feel older. (It’s hard to say when this story takes place. The 60s? 70s?) There are no adults to guide them; Maya’s grandmother who invites the girls to spend Christmas with her, feeds them martinis and doesn’t seem to mind when they flirt with much older men.

I kept turning the pages as Maya and Roe try to determine “What makes a person a person?” the prose was spare and the plot non-existent, but somehow I found it sort of intriguing, even though I wasn’t really sure there was a point. Well, maybe that’s the point. Your adolescence is just a series of missteps and ultimately, for better or worse, you step over the line from innocence to experience.