Judy MacDonald is such a flawless mimic of teenaged voices that this novel feels channelled, as if a group of ghostly high school students had started fooling around with a tape recorder in someone’s bedroom, with MacDonald there untangling their stories and uncovering how their fates turned out the way they did. In fact, MacDonald knows so much about teenage confusion and teenage pain – and how the two can sometimes fuse together and blow up everything – that the book occasionally resembles a true-crime account of adolescent passions gone wrong.

But Jane isn’t purely documentary in style, and it’s much more than another attempt to get under the skin of teenage anomie – it’s about girls. Suburban girls. Girls so far removed from their parents’ world that they might as well be aliens. Pretty-in-pink girls who fall into a black hole. Girls who like boys who do girls like they’re boys. Generic, anonymous girls – all so similiar they might as well have the same name: “Each one is a Jane. She’s nobody – she’s not special.”

There are two voices here – two girls who talk to us diary-style, in alternating entries. The first narrator, who is unnamed, has a big, achy heart, and she is deliriously in love with her boyfriend. At the same time – but in a different way – she loves her friend Adrian. Adrian is a girl you can dream with, she is beautiful, understands how shitty things are, and how awful men can be. Keiko is the other voice – but she seems more shy, and she’s always on her knees to some guy. Events unfold, with all three girls doing the usual things kids do in suburbia; they drive around, go to school, drop acid, have sex. The boyfriend murders one of the girls. Another dies soon after. Things – as people say when no one knows what the answers are – get out of control.

Jane is different from much of contemporary Canadian women’s writing. It’s unclotted by girly lyricism, the narrative has rigour and momentum, and the whole book evokes that sense of the creepiness and waste of urban life usually found in genius pop music, and almost never in the over-embroidered world of women’s fiction.