The Lion’s Den

For readers of Susan Choi and Paul Murray: In the haunted wilderness that is a 1980s suburban high school, two teenage girls forge a life-changing connection as they navigate the monstrous challenge of growing up.

Hope Rothbein and Marty Morris are high school best friends, existing on the cusp of adulthood, a place where imagination and reality jockey for control.Marty is a dedicated ballerina struggling in school and at home; Hope is straight-A student with a poet’s heart and a secret: her beloved mother Elaine, a once-celebrated artist, is in and out of the state mental hospital. Elaine has a secret of her own: she is at work on a new series of portraits featuring Hope and Marty that are based on old fairy tales, in an attempt to reclaim her identity as an artist. 

The girls find reprieve in their shared love of dance and poetry and in the elaborate feminist rituals they stage in the forest near their homes, but standing in their way are the adults tasked with their education. From the monsterish driver’s ed instructor to the cult leader of an English teacher, these real-life ogres treat the student body with exasperation and relentless indifference. As Hope and Marty confront the dangerous world they are growing up into, they must keep their wits about them, even as the events of their lives careen them toward an increasingly perilous cliff. 

Written with the fantastical sensibility of a modern fairy tale and the perfectly observed detail of a classic campus novel, The Lion’s Den is a lyrical and profoundly original evocation of young friendship and the uncanny other worlds that exist inside two vibrant teenage minds.

• “Bernheimer writes with great power about youth, friendship, heartache, motherhood, daughterhood, ridiculous teachers, the agonies of mental illness and the evergreen truths of big, badass dreams. This is one of the best books on high school I've ever read.”
  Laird Hunt, author of National Book Award finalist Zorrie
• “I’ve been waiting years for a new novel from Kate Bernheimer. It’s finally here and it’s brilliant...High school friends, Marty and Hope, had me from the get-go. The scars of childhood trauma begin to reveal themselves as the two friends walk unknowingly on ice that is cracking under their feet. A treasure of a novel."
  Willy Vlautin, author of The Horse