The story of A Gorgeous Excitement is anchored in the infamous 1986 murder of an 18-year-old Jewish woman in Central Park, an event that came to be known as “the Preppy Murder.” Yet the novel’s emotional core lies beyond the crime itself, in the perennial struggle for acceptance and respect between outsiders and the guardians of social power.

Nina Jacobs, the novel’s protagonist, is a young Jewish woman growing up on Manhattan’s ultra-WASPy Upper East Side in the 1980s. Her experience closely mirrors that of the novel’s author, who was also among a small handful of Jewish students at an elite Upper East Side private girls’ school where Christian hymns were sung at school assemblies. Anti-seminit slurs were casually deployed by her classmates. When Robert Chambers killed Jennifer Levin that summer, the press echoed these stereotypes: Chambers was portrayed as handsome and popular, while Levin was dismissed as “pushy.”

Nearly forty years after the events depicted in the novel, the author found herself hoping that the cruelties she described might feel dated to a younger generation. Instead, the patterns endure. Violence against young women is rising. Young men wear T-shirts declaring “Your body, my choice.” Antisemitism persists. The question remains painfully current: how are young women to feel accepted and safe while still holding to their identity?

A Gorgeous Excitement explores these difficult topics all while ending on a note of hard-won optimism. The author hopes readers will come away feeling that same sense of cautious hope.