Anna, 15, ran away to her older sister Delia’s in Los Angeles. She used her stepmother’s credit card to buy a plane ticket, a cost Anna’s now expected to repay. Delia’s boyfriend, Dex, writes for a Disneyesque series called Chips Ahoy! Anna spends days with Dex while Delia goes to auditions and appears in her former boyfriend Roger’s independent movie. Roger hires Anna to research Charles Manson for his film, and the inanity of Chips Ahoy! is stark contrast to the Manson murders, not to mention the uneasy life of beautiful Delia, whom Anna fears is being stalked. Anna can’t understand what made young women follow Manson and commit such atrocities. How and why did they fall under his thrall? In a startling, original, complex debut novel, Anna’s voice is sharp, witty, and also honest. Her mother is incredibly self-centered; her sister supportive but worrisome and frustrating; her stepmother annoying yet stable. The brilliantly realized Los Angeles setting also works as a means to magnify the ways women and girls everywhere are too often objectified, invisible, exploited, and sometimes abused. Anna's increasing clarity is poignant, and at times profound. “Los Angeles … is not really so different from the rest of America.” (Age 14 and older)

A bittersweet, honest, and widely acclaimed YA coming-of-age novel that distills honest truths about American girldom

Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood, and she's had it with her life at home. So Anna "borrows" her stepmom's credit card and runs away to Los Angeles, where her half-sister takes her in. But LA isn't quite the glamorous escape Anna had imagined.

As Anna spends her days on TV and movie sets, she engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls—and although the violence in her own life isn't the kind that leaves physical scars, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present.

In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the B-list in LA, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America—in short, on the B-list of life. Alison Umminger writes about girls, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't, in a way not often seen in teen fiction.

American Girls is:

An ALA Booklist Top 10 First Novel
A Kirkus Best Book of the Year
A Barnes & Noble Best YA Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best of 2016
A Bustle Best YA Book of the Year
YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults

"Messy, honest, and unflinchingly real. I can't get this book out of my head. I don't want to get this book out of my head." —Becky Albertalli, Morris Award-winning author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda