SKINNY

Gray Lachmann is 26 years old, lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, Mikey, a comedian on the rise, and runs her own successful comedy booking business. But she’s unable to come to terms with the recent death of her father—a man who had grown increasingly Orthodox in his Judaism in the years before he died, and from whom she was estranged because Mikey isn’t Jewish. In her search for answers, she takes a job as a counselor at Camp Carolina, a weight-loss camp of dubious credentials in North Carolina. There, she is surrounded by a compelling cast of characters: her devious co-counselor, Sheena; the self-aggrandizing camp director, Lewis; the hot assistant director, Bennett; and an assorted group of campers who thwart every attempt at control-including Eden, her newly discovered 16-year-old half-sister.

While at the camp, Gray covertly tries to understand who her father was by getting closer to Eden. At the same time, she must face truths about both her emotional and physical self in order to finally find peace with her father and her own inner demons. Visceral, poignant and often funny, through taught and gorgeous prose, Spechler brings to light the lies we often hide behind and how they can keep us from seeing the beauty beneath the surface of those around us and even ourselves.