Or by the reader. Thernstrom avoids overblown prose, and her work is mimetic. She cannot explain the reasons for the egregious crime, because, she suggests, there is not always an answer to why. Given the topic and the author's near-brutal realism, The Dead Girl at times reads like an extended obituary. But the work never fails to be engrossing and rewarding.

The Dead Girl is imbued with a poignant warmth. The digressive book is given to flashback and careful detail, and Thernstrom writes intimately about Lee and their frank discussions. It seems odd to some that events like Lee sabotaging her own chances of going to MIT, or Lee's first sexual encounter and pregnancy scare would be included in a popular work like The Dead Girl. But in reading, it becomes obvious that Thernstrom wants--indeed needs--the reader to know the artistic and capricious girl she knew. And although Lee, in Thernstrom's candid depiction of her, is not always likeable, the reader never doubts their friendship.

In a number of ways, this is as much a book about Thernstrom as about Lee. The Dead Girl is a memorial to a friend, but it is also a ventilation of personal outrage. For Thernstrom, knowing her "characters" also means knowing her conciousness of them. And knowing of her loss.

Thernstrom, in the story she tells, loses not only a friend, but her notions of justice and retribution. Page eventually beats the murder charge, and is convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter, free on bail. He still awaits the results of an appeal, while Thernstrom awaits the arrival of a lost friend in her dreams.

The Dead Girl, despite a few sensationalist tendencies, is at once a genuinly sensitive, intelligent, humane and literate book that deals honestly with the dangers, especially for women, of coming of age in a violent time. It raises some unsettling questions about friendship, love and trust.

Writing the book was obviously a very redemptive act for Thernstrom, and she writes in a courageous voice. But it in the end, it is the tragedy that resonates. As the author writes in the Postscript, "[N]o one can write for another because no one's spirit is like another's. The loss is, as it was, irreparable."