Madeleine George

Madeleine George writes fiction and drama that pay close attention to language, social categories, and how people become visible to one another. Looks, her 2008 teen novel from Viking, brings together Meghan and Aimee after both are hurt by the same popular classmate. Meghan is visibly large yet treated as socially unseen, while extremely thin Aimee turns pain outward through anger. Meghan answers isolation through poetry, but a poem taken from her journal becomes another weapon against her. Their eventual alliance begins in shared humiliation and a plan for revenge, then forces each girl to revise her assumptions about the other. George later became widely known as a playwright, and Penguin's author biography notes her work with the Obie-winning collective 13P. Looks already shows the dramatic instincts that suit a writer for the stage: sharply differentiated voices, pressure-filled encounters, and scenes organized around what characters reveal or withhold. Its central concern is recognition, both from peers and between the two girls themselves.