Hot summer nights. Parties. Small town Ontario. Drugs and alcohol. Waitressing. Hitchhiking. Best friends. Nicknames. This is Mary Jo Pollak’s first novel, Summer Burns.

Living in the 1970s – where freedom mixes with drug dependency, where sexual awakening is sometimes accompanied by tragedy – young Joan comes face-to-face with her small town’s secrets, including wife-swapping, dangerous sexual ceremonies, biker gangs, and a woman who mysteriously has had her fingers cut off. With an overabundance of drugs (marijuana, acid, hash, and cocaine), Pollak’s quiet protagonist floats from party to party, aware of what is happening around her and to her friends, but, in order to live with it, she chooses to ignore it. This is teenagehood, where you can hitchhike with an off-duty soldier, get home safely, and later find out that something terrible happened to the girl who decided to move in with him. And then, of course, push that news to the bottom of your soul and get on with having a good time.

Pollak’s novel brims with clear, quiet tenderness. Her characters are complex without being stagey. Her writing is awash with brief, short, sweet sentences: no heavy metaphors weigh the prose down.

Coming of age is a struggle. And from Pollak’s point of view, the constant battle is to get through it and become an adult, even while you are careening down the road, high on something or other and you think you’re having fun. Watch out for this writer, she’s sure to hook us again with something this pure, this addictive.