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by Anna Bruno
A smart, contemporary, page-turning campus novel—Prep meets I Have Some Questions for You—in which a high-school senior investigating the death of a star hockey player at her elite Jesuit school discovers the rot at the heart of the institution, as well as some surprising truths about her own past.
Frankie is a good daughter, a loyal best friend, and a model student, coasting through her final semester at an elite Catholic prep school in a wealthy Pittsburgh enclave. But acceptance to her dream college leaves her unmoored. When a classmate takes his life after posting a cryptic message about Woolf Whiting, a former student who died in a presumed suicide years earlier, she begins to question whether getting what she wants will ever be enough.
As the community mourns, a muffled conversation between Frankie's mom, who teaches history at the school, and the priest who teaches her philosophy class, captures her imagination. Soon, Frankie is drawn into an investigation of the life and death of Woolf, who had been a legendary star hockey player with the brightest of futures. Frankie speaks to Woolf's sister, Maddie, now a high-powered lawyer in New York; his former girlfriend, Susanna Mercer—who Woolf's mother is convinced knows more about Woolf's death than she has revealed; and his best friend, Vince Mahoney. With the help of her best friend, she unravels the mystery of what happened, revealing the darkside of her supposedly elite education.
With a wry, up-the-patriarchy, wise-beyond-her-years narrator in Frankie and a page-turning plot, Fine Young People is a cold-case mystery with a Hitchcockian twist and a portrait of a young woman searching for meaning in a world that values achievement above all else—perfect for anyone who loves a campus novel with a decidedly contemporary voice.
"[A] solid outing...A less assured writer might have failed to make it all coalesce, but Bruno pulls it off, thanks to her keen sense of what's at stake for her teenage characters and Frankie's indelible voice. It's a winner." —Publishers Weekly
"A finely crafted meditation on family, community, class, wealth, insidious power, and the limits of religion." —Booklist
"An engrossing mystery about the perils of belonging, how joy and tragedy can irrevocably shape close-knit communities, and the all-consuming pursuit of the truth, Fine Young People grabbed me in the first few pages and never let me go. The sparkling prose, robust character work, and expert plotting make this novel perfect for readers of Liz Moore and Rebecca Makkai. An absolute gem." ―Katy Hays, author of The Cloisters
"Fine Young People is, unusually but in more than one sense, a mystery novel—not only about the mystery of a young man's death some twenty years in the narrator's past but about the mystery of the overlapping things, the eternal present, the mysteries of faith and grief and friendship. What might be most impressive about it is how much it manages to express without ever laboring for breath. It's eloquent, but casual about it; moving, but casual about it; funny, but casual about it; suffused with the deep unknown, but casual about it." ―Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
This information about Fine Young People was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anna Bruno is the author of Fine Young People (Algonquin, 2025) and Ordinary Hazards (Atria, 2020). She teaches at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Previously, Anna managed public relations and marketing for technology and financial services companies in Silicon Valley. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, an MBA from Cornell University, and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Iowa City with her husband, two sons, and blue heeler.
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