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The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia
Amazon's Best Nonfiction Book of the Month for June 2023
Nylon's "June 2023's Must-Read Book Releases"
Pure Wow's "11 Books We Can't Wait to Read in June"
The Skimm's "17 of Our Favorite Books Coming Out This Summer"
Glamour's "15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023, So Far"
Bustle's "Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023"
Harper's Bazaar's "23 Best Summer Beach Reads of 2023"
Zibby Mag's "Most Anticipated Spring and Summer Books"
A New York Post Best Books of the Week selection Three suburban girls meet at a boarding school for troubled teens.
Eight years later, they were dead. Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha's basement--innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away. Samantha did not know then, but Elissa had just become one of the fifty-thousand-plus kids per year who enter the Troubled Teen Industry: a network of unregulated programs meant to reform wealthy, wayward youth. Less than a year after graduation from Ponca Pines Academy, Elissa died at eighteen years old. In Samantha's grief, she fixated on Elissa's last years at the therapeutic boarding school, eager to understand why their paths diverged. As she spoke to mutual friends and scoured social media pages, Samantha learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa's closest friends at the school who shared both her name and penchant for partying, where drugs and alcohol became their norm. The matching Save Our Souls tattoo all three girls also had further fueled Samantha's fixation, as she watched their lives play out online. Four years after Elissa's death, Alyssa died, then Alissa at twenty-six. In The Elissas, Samantha endeavors to understand why they ultimately met a shared, tragic fate that she was spared, in turn, offering a chilling account of the secret lives of young suburban women.
Nylon's "June 2023's Must-Read Book Releases"
Pure Wow's "11 Books We Can't Wait to Read in June"
The Skimm's "17 of Our Favorite Books Coming Out This Summer"
Glamour's "15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023, So Far"
Bustle's "Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023"
Harper's Bazaar's "23 Best Summer Beach Reads of 2023"
Zibby Mag's "Most Anticipated Spring and Summer Books"
A New York Post Best Books of the Week selection Three suburban girls meet at a boarding school for troubled teens.
Eight years later, they were dead. Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha's basement--innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away. Samantha did not know then, but Elissa had just become one of the fifty-thousand-plus kids per year who enter the Troubled Teen Industry: a network of unregulated programs meant to reform wealthy, wayward youth. Less than a year after graduation from Ponca Pines Academy, Elissa died at eighteen years old. In Samantha's grief, she fixated on Elissa's last years at the therapeutic boarding school, eager to understand why their paths diverged. As she spoke to mutual friends and scoured social media pages, Samantha learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa's closest friends at the school who shared both her name and penchant for partying, where drugs and alcohol became their norm. The matching Save Our Souls tattoo all three girls also had further fueled Samantha's fixation, as she watched their lives play out online. Four years after Elissa's death, Alyssa died, then Alissa at twenty-six. In The Elissas, Samantha endeavors to understand why they ultimately met a shared, tragic fate that she was spared, in turn, offering a chilling account of the secret lives of young suburban women.
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Community Reviews
“Each suburb has its own mythology” and the Troubled Teen Industry is no exception. A large faction of the “web of therapeutic boarding schools, boot camps, and other treatment centers that preach tough love and practice behavior modification.”
“The majority of the school’s dozen-odd students bore either the same or strikingly similar names. Like…Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa…Their bodies, bank accounts, and bad behavior beckoned to us…The rich and the poor are just as likely to drink, do drugs, and have sex. But economic status dictates the punishments these teens receive for their misdeeds.”
There were two types of graduates: “those who feel they’ve truly been rehabilitated, healed. And those like Alyssa, Alissa, and Elissa, who unfortunately didn’t live to say.” Instead of transformation, the industry’s attempts at conversion created a binary: “That choice to either move forward as a reformed woman or return to life as a troubled teen….Doing everything she could to be a good girl, no longer a good-time girl…temporarily tempering that tempestuous streak.”
“It was the school’s original sin…labeling them as bad, or in the cases of Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa, troubled…The labels that had been placed on them and the judgment they’d incurred had also isolated them, making them more susceptible to addiction or vice. Leading them to fall prey to the ultimate price of being part of their lineage. That danger I so feared would come for Elissa, coming for them all,” resurrecting long-buried grief in family and friends lament, “I don’t have any Elissas left.”
“Defined by her desire to burn the brightest. A hunger to experience it all, despite the consequences, that made her destined to burn fast, and then burn out,” The Elissas is the act of catharsis that empowers us all to make peace with the inextricable pieces of ourselves defined by the Elissas of the Troubled Teen Industry and reclaim an inheritance of empowerment for the Elissas of today and tomorrow.
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