In Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead, Cory Ansel, a directionless high school graduate, has had all her college applications rejected. After spending the summer working as a camp counselor, she is loath to return to the New York City home she shares with her mother Emer, an ambitious career-oriented woman whose energy Cory has no interest in matching. So instead, she lets herself be picked up by Rolo Picazo, the pharmaceutical CEO father of a camper, and swept away to a private island. Her meeting Rolo and their subsequent trip to a nearby diner are rendered in luscious, sensual prose that pulls the reader into the mind of a wayward teenager whose intentions can be swayed as much by a sugar high as an opportunity to luxuriate in nothingness, which is what seems to be on offer.

Rolo suggests that he will pay her to nanny his two children, Spenser and Fern, but the tension between him ...