Thomas Rayfiel's Colony Girl

Colony Girl

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 hard

Early in Thomas Rayfiel's evocative and engaging novel Colony Girl, an adult character says to a group of teenage girls: "You're not kids anymore. You're some grotesque hybrid." Not yet members of the experienced and hardened world of adulthood, and no longer innocent and sweet-cheeked children, teenagers are trapped in a kind of limbo, and Rayfiel sets his second novel in this zone of confusion and awkward growth. And although Colony Girl can be classified as a coming-of-age story, it manages to rise above the predictability and potential tiredness of that genre, mainly because of Eve, the plucky 15-year-old narrator.

Eve lives with her mother (she has never known her father) outside of Arhat, Iowa (population 8,000), in a religious community known as the Colony. Eve is just Eve -- she has no last name anymore because people in the Bible didn't have last names either, and the Bible is followed to the word. The Colony -- a hippie commune crossed with a religious cult -- is overseen by a man named Gordon, who lately, instead of preaching to the families in his community, holes up in his house watching his big-screen television and drinking Everclear.

Meanwhile, Eve, much like her biblical namesake (which is too apt to be coincidental), takes a summer job with a road crew and is tempted by many things from the outside world, mainly booze and sex -- those two trusty vices. Soon, Eve falls in love with two men -- a teenage stud muffin named Joey Biswanger, and his widowed, pudgy, middle-aged father, Herbert. As Eve says, "I wanted every kind of love there was, all rolled up into one." She's a little firecracker, this Eve.

Much of the novel explores Eve's simultaneous and conflicted feelings for these two men, but the Colony and its rules for living are never far from her mind, and she feels both drawn to and repulsed by life there. And just when she thinks she can leave the suffocating Colony behind for good, she is drawn back -- to try to thwart Gordon's plan to take Eve's 16-year-old best friend as his bride.

Colony Girl is chock-full of sexual and religious tension, and Rayfiel's writing is always lively and crisp. His shining achievement here is Eve, who manages to be both authoritative and confused, aggressive and vulnerable, sexy and awkward, funny and sad. In other words, she's like any adolescent -- a bundle of contradictions.

Too bad that the ending of the novel feels rushed, as if Rayfiel had a page limit and had to end it as quickly as he could, with all bases covered, all strings neatly tied. By story's end, the reader isn't quite ready to leave Eve behind, which is a testament to the author's wonderful creation.