The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. Even in her small midwestern city, where modesty is prized and self-assertion is a faux pas, she flies under the radar — a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent.

Luckily, she has a best friend, a similarly undiscovered girl with whom she shares the everyday adventures — sometimes harrowing, sometimes embarrassing — of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed and character is forged.

In time, their friendship is tested by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them as if they were found objects, and by the first startling, subversive intimations of womanhood.

With dry, irrepressible wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders, and that within the souls of the awkward and the overlooked often burns something radiant.