Rebecca Godfrey’s debut novel relates a pivotal few days in the life of 16-year-old Sara Shaw. Raised by her gentle hippie father, she is a quiet teenager who loves “the safety of bank balances, the clean smell of bleach.” Sara’s life is thrown off balance when her burnout friends rape Heather, a stoner girl at school, with a garden hose. Heather explains, “It was just sex. They wanted to do it so I let them.” Sara, attracted to Heather’s tough exterior but puzzled by her vulnerability, attempts to find out the meaning of these contradictions by descending into the down-and-dirty Red Zone of Victoria, B.C., circa 1984.

The Torn Skirt is a raw, intimate novel: it feels as though a girl sitting next to you on the bus is showing you her diary. Godfrey effectively captures the self-centred teenager’s love of drama, and the extreme and sudden personality shifts. She gets the teenage voice and psyche down cold – so cold that, at times, Sara is as annoying as a real teenager. Sara’s downfall is too swift to be completely believable, though – she goes from boredom to almost-whoredom and substance abuse, with a stint in rehab thrown into the mix, topped off by a contemplation of suicide by drug overdose and a stabbing, all in a matter of days.

The book manages to grab and hold onto the reader because Godfrey’s writing often sparkles: Sara’s injured skater boy-friend is “seamed like a teddy bear,” while a man has lips that are “clammy and metallic. It was like kissing a lock.” At its best, The Torn Skirt exposes the fragile underbelly of adolescence and of the City of Gardens – perhaps the story feels implausible because we’d rather not believe in what is found there.