I am curious about how many people go into the book knowing that I’m a guy and how many know that I am not this character, and how that affects their reading of the book.

Could you talk a little bit about how were able to use those voices so convincingly?

You can find my review of the book at Geek Girl In Love.Ī lot of September Girls is told from the first-person narration of a straight teenage boy and some of it is told from the point of view of teenage girls. Although this book isn’t a “romance novel”, it has a lot to say about love (romantic and familial) as the recognition and acceptance of another person as a human being as opposed to a fantasy or a prize. He develops a whole new relationship with her, one that’s much more real and mature, when he gets to know her as a person instead of a fantasy. Sam’s crush on Dee Dee is largely based on her being mysterious. Sam develops a crush on Dee Dee, one of The Girls (not a typo – that’s how they are referred to in the book). The narrator, Sam, is a teenage boy who goes with his father and older brother to a beach town where he meets a group of mysterious and beautiful teenage girls – all of whom seem drawn to him. I often talk about a book in terms of whether or not it “stuck”, and the dreamlike quality of this book, and the bittersweet relationship between the main characters, has stayed with me in a powerful emotional way for months. September Girls is a book in which the main character goes through so much personal growth that I almost set the book aside after the first couple of chapters but ended up completely devoted to it. Madison has described himself as being 'an open and enthusiastic gay.Back in May, I had the opportunity to interview Bennett Madison, author of September Girls. HarperTeen published September Girls in 2013. In 2009 HarperTeen published his third novel, The Blonde of the Joke. He has published two additional books- Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (2005) and Lulu Dark & the Summer of the Fox (2006)-about a teenage girl detective, Lulu Dark.

He moved to Brooklyn, New York shortly thereafter and began work on several novels. Madison's first book, I Hate Valentine’s Day, a light polemic against Valentine’s Day, was published in 2004. He was a childhood friend of John Walker Lindh. He was educated at Montgomery Blair High School and attended Sarah Lawrence College. Bennett Madison at the 2013 Texas Book Festival.īennett Madison (born March 28, 1981) is an American author.īennett Madison was born in 1981 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland.

September Girls by Bennett Madison