Needle Lake

The sharply observed sophomore effort by Champine (Knife River) examines the double-edged bond between two teen girls. Ida, the neurodivergent 14-year-old narrator, spends most of her free time helping her mother at the family’s convenience store in their fading logging town of Mineral, Wash. At school, she’s regularly bullied by her classmates. After her guidance counselor calls her a “square peg,” she’s overcome by a “sick feeling... of having done something wrong, and everyone could understand what it was but me.” Her perspective shifts when her 16-year-old cousin, Elna, arrives from San Francisco for an extended stay. Elna turns out to be a hustler, earning money by mending clothes for the loggers. Ida envies the pretty older girl’s free spirit (“Like there was a formula my cousin had cracked that made the world, and the people in it, easy for her to navigate”). When Elna gives Ida a butterfly charm, Ida feels “a surge of belonging so powerful I thought my heart might explode.” But Elna’s charisma belies a dark side, and her magical effect on Ida evaporates during their confrontation with a logger, which turns violent after he catches them stealing from him. In Ida, Champine has crafted a singular perspective, and the plot builds to a surprising twist. This satisfies. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Dec.)