“'We swim in the soup we've made,' the protagonist of LB Gschwandtner’s compulsively readable novel, The Other New Girl, observes. The ingredients of this dark and disturbing coming-of-age novel include adolescent cruelty, religious hypocrisy, and the sadder-but-wiser perspective of the adult who dares to look back. Gschwandtner asks the question 'Do we ever really get over high school?' Like me, other readers may ponder that question for themselves as they race through this harrowing and heartbreaking tale of the after-effects of power misused. I was riveted."
―Wally Lamb, author of six New York Times best-selling novels, including I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, and She’s Come Undone, and was twice selected for Oprah’s Book Club

“A coming-of-age story, woven with the pace of a thriller. The protagonist is wonderfully relatable, her wise but somewhat salty outlook appeals to the outsider in us all. The prose is fresh while we reminisce with the characters; we learn from them as they reveal their navigation of adolescent rites of passage, Quaker philosophy, bullying, and young love. A nuanced and satisfying read.”
―Eileen Dougharty, story performer and writer

"LB Gschwandtner has created a complex tale of loyalty and betrayal, of youthful alliances and conflicts, and the incredible tension between doing the right thing, and protecting one's sense of self. Susannah Greenwood is not the newer girl; Moll Grimes is. And their relationship, the way this story builds in a setting fraught with the moral and strict demands of both their peers, the stringent Dean, Miss Bleaker, and their own hearts, makes for a fine, moving story."
―Robert Bausch, author of Far as The Eye Can See and The Legend of Jesse Smoke